Read Like A Writer

There are two ways to learn how to write fiction: by reading it and by writing it. Yes, you can learn lots about writing stories in workshops, in writing classes and writing groups, at writers' conferences. You can learn technique and process by reading the dozens of books like this one on fiction writing and by reading articles in writers' magazines. But the best teachers of fiction are the great works of fiction themselves. You can learn more about the structure of a short story by reading Anton Chekhov's 'Heartache' than you can in a semester of Creative Writing 101. If you read like a writer, that is, which means you have to read everything twice, at least. When you read a story or novel the first time, just let it happen. Enjoy the journey. When you've finished, you know where the story took you, and now you can go back and reread, and this time notice how the writer reached that destination. Notice the choices he made at each chapter, each sentence, each word. (Every word is a choice.) You see now how the transitions work, how a character gets across a room. All this time you're learning. You loved the central character in the story, and now you can see how the writer presented the character and rendered her worthy of your love and attention. The first reading is creative—you collaborate with the writer in making the story. The second reading is critical.


John Dufresne, from his book, The Lie That Tells A Truth: A Guide to Writing Fiction

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Showing posts with label F. Scott Fitzgerald. Show all posts
Showing posts with label F. Scott Fitzgerald. Show all posts

Thursday, May 5, 2022

Shaggy's Morning by F Scott Fitzgerald

 

Shaggy's Morning

by

F Scott Fitzgerald


First published in Esquire, May 1935.


I woke up after a lousy dream, and as soon as the old beezer came alive I went around the yard trying to pick up something interesting, but the wind was too strong.

There was an old biscuit in my dish and if there's anything gloomier than one dead biscuit on a windy morning I don't know about it.

The Brain came downstairs early like she usually does ever since she began staying away all day long. I gave her a rush, and I meant it, too. I'm not one of these diggities that think their boss is a god, even if he's an old nigger that smells like everybody that gave him his clothes—but really anybody would have to hand it to the Brain.

Since I grew up and got the idea that they don't go in much for any perfumes except their own, I never had any trouble with her—except the time I brought her that bone in the middle of the night and she hit me in the eye with it.

I was hoping it was about the right day to go out in the country and swim, but nothing doing—she got into her moving room at the usual time and shoved off, and I had to amuse myself. It wasn't the first time I wished I had something regular to do. My friend across the street was waiting for his chow, which he gets in the morning, so I had a workout with the little squirt next door. He came tearing over, cursing and threatening, because he knew I never hurt him.

"You big, clumsy tub of hair, I could run rings around you, and I'm out to prove it!"

"Yeah?" I said, kind of amused, because he talks as if he meant it, and we went through a routine with a lot of false starts, charges, leg and throat holds, rollaways, and escapes. It was all right, and after, while we were panting plenty, but I don't get much of a workout with him, because he uses up so much time dodging and doing circles. I like a dog to go in and take it. Even a little fellow like him. Once he let a tooth slip and nipped me, and I gave him hell.

"Don't take advantage, or I'll tear your coat off."

"Aw, don't get sore."

"Then don't let that tooth slip again."

While we were resting he said: "What are you doing this morning?"

"What's on your mind? You won't get me out after some cat again. Some dogs never grow up."

"It's no cat."

"Then what is it? Meat—or girls?"

"I'll take you there and you can see for yourself."

"You're generous all of a sudden. How big's the dog that's there now?"

While we waited for my friend we did some barking—or rather the squirt did most of it. These little tykes can yelp all day without getting hoarse. He made some circles around a bunch of kids heading for school, and I had a laugh when he got a kick in the ribs and gave out a real yelp. I only barked a little in the base to stretch my throat—I'm not one of the kind always shooting off their mouth.

After my friend came out we went with the squirt to see what he'd found. Just like I thought, it was nothing—a garbage can with a lid you could nose off. I got a whiff of some perfume, too, that bucked me up for a minute, but it was yesterday's, so my friend and I roughed up the squirt for wasting our time and went off on our own.

We followed a tall lady for a while—no particular reason except she had a parcel with meat in it—we knew we wouldn't get any, but you never can tell. Sometimes I just feel like shutting my nose and just following somebody pretending they're yours, or that they're taking you somewhere. After a couple of streets I picked up a new perfume.

"There's some romance," I said.

"Say you got a nose." He tried for it, but didn't get anything.

"I must be getting old. I can always remember shapes, but I get mixed up on perfume."

"Shucks, it's just the wind," I said, to make him feel all right, but he has got a weak nose. Now me, I got a fine nose, but I'm weak on shapes. In a minute, though, he got it, and we left the lady and started back down the street at a trot. Say we must have followed a mile, both of us getting more and more disgusted.

"What's the use?" my friend said. "Either I'm crazy or we're not following one scent, but about ten."

"I get about twenty."

"What say we quit?"

"Well, we're pretty near now."

We got up on a hill presently and looked down—and, say, I haven't seen so many curs since the dog show.

"Sold," I says, and we started home.

The Brain wasn't there yet, but the Beard was. He got out that damn pole and tried to kid me again, holding it out and jabbering—a long time ago I figured out that his object is to see if I'm fool enough to jump over it. But I don't bite, just walk round it. Then he tried the trick they all do—held my paws and tried to balance me up on the end of my spine. I never could figure out the point of that one.

He started the music-box, that tune that makes my ear hum and starts me howling—so I lammed it out and down the street. A dog passed me carrying a newspaper looking all pleased with himself—but the one time I tried that racket I forgot what it was I was carrying and started to bury it, and when the Beard saw me, was he sore!

Pretty soon I saw my friend coming down the street. He was a fine big dog. He stopped and visited for a minute, with a child he knew, and then he saw me, and came running in my direction. What happened next I couldn't see. It was noon, and there were lots of moving rooms at the cross street—the first thing I knew was that one of them had stopped and then another, and that several people had gotten out. I hurried over with some men.

It was my friend, lying on his side and bleeding out of his mouth; his eyes were open, but his breathing was wrong. Everybody was excited, and they pulled him up on the lawn: by and by his little boy and girl ran out of their house and came over and began to cry. I and another dog that knew him well went up to him, and I wanted to lick him, but when I came really close he snarled, "Scram!" and got half up on his haunches. He thought I was going to eat him just because he was down.

The little boy said, "Get away, you!" and it made me feel bad because I've never eaten a dog in my life, and would not unless I was very hungry. But of course, I went away so as not to worry him, and waited until they carried him away on a blanket. After that we sniffed at the blood in the street and one dog licked it.

In the front yard I howled. I don't know why—then I went to look for the Brain. When I didn't find her I began to figure that maybe something had happened to her, too, and she wouldn't be back any more. I went up on the porch and waited, but she didn't come, so I scratched on the screen and went in and howled a little at the Beard, who gave me a head scratch.

Presently I went to the door, and there was the Brain, getting out of her moving room—I made a rush for her anyhow, and put my nose in her hand and almost tripped her going upstairs. It was good to know she was home. She gave me dinner—the ground beef again and biscuit and milk and a good bone. I picked out the meat first; then I drank the milk and licked the biscuits, but didn't eat them; then I polished my teeth on the bone and buried it shallow—I must have a hundred bones around here, and I don't know why I save them. I never find them again unless accidentally, but I just can't stand leaving them around.

Afterwards I started to go over and see my friend, but there was nobody around except the little girl sitting in the swing and crying.


THE END

 

About the Author 

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald (1896 - 1940), better known as F. Scott Fitzgerald, was an American author of novels and short stories, born in St. Paul, Minnesota, and raised in an Irish middle class family. He is best known for his masterpiece, The Great Gatsby and Tender Is the Night.

The author was named after his famous second cousin, Francis Scott Key, who penned The Star Spangled Banner.

Fitzgerald's prolific short stories tend to center around the promise of youth, followed by the effects of age and despair. Fitzgerald was considered one of the best authors of the twentieth century, a leading voice for the "Lost Generation" of the 1920s and the Jazz Age.

F. Scott Fitzgerald spent a great deal of his youth in Buffalo, New York, then moved to New Jersey to attend Princeton University. Fitzgerald dropped out and enlisted in the U.S. Army in 1917 on the brink of World War I, but did not see combat. He became an officer, married, and after being decommissioned, went to New York City to pursue his literary career. This Side of Paradise was his first successful novel, allowing him to travel extensively in Paris and the French Riviera in the 1920s, creating the backdrop for his most widely-acclaimed work, The Great Gatsby which was published in 1925. He befriended great authors such as Ernest Hemingway during this period. Fitzgerald contributed stories to The Saturday Evening Post for most of his career. The first story in which his name appeared on the cover was Bernice Bobs Her Hair (1920).

Fitzgerald was in poor health after spending most of his adulthood abusing alcohol and suffered three heart attacks. He died at the age of 44 in 1941.

Buy F Scott Fitzgerald Books at Amazon

A Snobbish Story by F Scott Fitzgerald

A Snobbish Story

by

F Scott Fitzgerald


Published in
Saturday Evening Post 29 November 1930


I.

It is difficult for young people to live things down. We will tolerate vice, grand larceny and the quieter forms of murder in our contemporaries, because we are so strong and incorruptible ourselves, but our children's friends must show a blank service record. When young Josephine Perry was "removed" by her father from the Brereton School, where she had accidentally embraced a young man in the chapel, some of the best people in Chicago would have liked to have seen her drawn and quartered. But the Perrys were rich and powerful, so that friends rallied to their daughter's reputation—and Josephine's lovely face with its expression of just having led the children from a burning orphan asylum did the rest.

Certainly there was no consciousness of disgrace in it when she entered the grand stand at Lake Forest on the first day of the tennis tournament. Same old crowd, she seemed to say, turning, without any curiosity, half left, half right—not that I object, but you can't expect me to get excited.

It was a bright day, with the sun glittering on the crowd; the white figures on the courts threw no shadow. Over in Europe the bloody terror of the Somme was just beginning, but the war had become second-page news and the question agitating the crowd was who would win the tournament. Dresses were long and hats were small and tight, and America, shut in on itself, was bored beyond belief.

Josephine, representing in her own person the future, was not bored; she was merely impatient for a change. She gazed about until she found friends; they waved and she joined them. Only as she sat down did she realize that she was also next to a lady whose lips, in continual process of masking buck teeth, gave her a deceptively pleasant expression. Mrs. McRae belonged to the drawing-and-quartering party. She hated young people, and by some perverse instinct was drawn into contact with them, as organizer of the midsummer vaudeville at Lake Forest and of dancing classes in Chicago during the winter. She chose rich, plain girls and brought them along, bullying boys into dancing with them and comparing them to their advantage with the more popular black sheep—the most prominent representative of this flock being Josephine.

But Josephine was stiffened this afternoon by what her father had said the night before: "If Jenny McRae raises a finger against you, heaven help Jim." This was because of a rumor that Mrs. McRae, as an example for the public weal, was going to omit Josephine's usual dance with Travis de Coppet from the vaudeville that summer.

As a matter of fact, Mrs. McRae had, upon her husband's urgent appeal, reconsidered; she was one large, unconvincing smile. After a short but obvious conference behind her own eyes, she said:

"Do you see that young man on the second court, with the head-band?" And as Josephine gazed apathetically, "That's my nephew from Minneapolis. They say he has a fine chance to win here. I wonder if you'd be a sweet girl and be nice to him and introduce him to the young people."

Again she hesitated. "And I want to see you about the vaudeville soon. We expect you and Travis to do that marvelous, marvelous Maxixe for us."

Josephine's inner response was the monosyllable "Huh!"

She realized that she didn't want to be in the vaudeville, but only to be invited. And another look at Mrs. McRae's nephew decided her that the price was too high.

"The Maxixe is stale now," she answered, but her attention had already wandered. Someone was staring at her from near by, someone whose eyes burned disturbingly, like an uncharted light.

Turning to speak to Travis de Coppet, she could see the pale lower half of a face two rows behind, and during the burst of clapping at the end of a game she turned and made a cerebral photograph of the entire individual as her eyes wandered casually down the row.

He was a tall, even a high young man, with a rather small head set on enormous round shoulders. His face was pale; his eyes were nearly black, with an intense, passionate light in them; his mouth was sensitive and strongly set. He was poorly dressed—green shine on his suit, a shabby string of a necktie and a bum cap. When she turned he looked at her with rigid hunger, and kept looking at her after she had turned away, as if his eyes could burn loopholes through the thin straw of her hat.

Suddenly Josephine realized what a pleasant scene it was, and, relaxing, she listened to the almost regular pat-smack, smack-pat-pat of the balls, the thud of a jump and the overtone of the umpire's "Fault;" "Out;" "Game and set, 6-2, Mr. Oberwalter." The sun moved slowly westward off the games and gossip. The day's matches ended.

Rising, Mrs. McRae said to Josephine: "Then shall I bring Donald to you when he's dressed? He doesn't know a soul. I count on you. Where will you be?"

Josephine accepted the burden patiently: "I'll wait right here."

Already there was music on the outdoor platform beside the club, and there was a sound of clinking waiters as the crowd swayed out of the grand stand. Josephine refused to go and dance, and presently the three young men, each of whom had loved and lost her, moved on to other prospects, and Josephine picked them out presently below a fringe by their well-known feet—Travis de Coppet's deft, dramatic feet; Ed Bement's stern and uncompromising feet; Elsie Kerr's warped ankles; Lillian's new shoes; the high, button shoes of some impossible girl. There were more feet; the stands were almost empty now, and canvas was being spread over the lonely courts. She heard someone coming clumsily down the plank behind her and landing with a plunk upon the board on which she sat, lifting her an abrupt inch into the air.

"D' I jar you?"

It was the man she had noticed and forgotten. He was still very tall.

"Don't you go in for dancing?" he asked, lingering. "I picked you out for the belle of the ball."

"You're rather fresh, aren't you?"

"My error," he said. "I should have known you were too swell to be spoken to."

"I never saw you before."

"I never saw you either, but you looked so nice in your hat, and I saw you smiling to your friends, so I thought I'd take a chance."

"Like you do downstate, hey, Si?" retorted Josephine insolently.

"What's the matter with downstate? I come from Abe Lincoln's town, where the boys are big and brilliant."

"What are you—a dance-hall masher?"

He was extraordinarily handsome, and she liked his imperviousness to insult.

"Thanks. I'm a reporter—not sports, or society either. I came to do the atmosphere—you know, a fine day with the sun sizzling on high and all the sporting world as well as the fashionable world of Lake Forest out in force."

"Hadn't you better go along and write it then?"

"Finished; another fellow took it. Can I sit down for a minute, or do you soil easily? A mere breath of wind and poof! Listen, Miss Potterfield-Swiftcormick, or whatever your name is. I come from good people and I'm going to be a great writer some day." He sat down. "If anybody comes you can say I was interviewing you for the paper. What's your name?"

"Perry."

"Herbert T. Perry?"

She nodded and he looked at her hard for a moment.

"Well, well," he sighed, "most attractive girl I've met for months turns out to be Herbert T. Perry's daughter. As a rule, you society nuts aren't much to look at. I mean, you pass more pretty girls in the Loop in one hour than I've seen here this afternoon, and the ones here have the advantage of dressing and all that. What's your first name?"

She started to say "Miss," but suddenly it seemed pointless, and she answered "Josephine."

"My name's John Boynton Bailey." He handed her his card with CHICAGO TRIBUNE printed in the corner. "Let me inform you I'm the best reporter in this city. I've written a play that ought to be produced this fall. I'm telling you that to prove I'm not just some bum, as you may judge from my old clothes. I've got some better clothes home, but I didn't think I was going to meet you."

"I just thought you were sort of fresh to speak to me without being introduced."

"I take what I can get," he admitted moodily.

At the sudden droop of his mouth, thoughtful and unhappy, Josephine knew that she liked him. For a moment she did not want Mrs. McRae and her nephew to see her with him; then, abruptly, she did not care.

"It must be wonderful to write."

"I'm just getting started, but you'll be proud to know me sometime." He changed the subject. "You've got wonderful features—you know it? You know what features are—the eyes and the mouth together, not separately—the triangle they make. That's how people decide in a flash whether they like other people. A person's nose and shape of the face are just things he's born with and can't change. They don't matter, Miss Gotrocks."

"Please cut out the Stone Age slang."

"All right; but you've got nice features. Is your father good-looking?"

"Very," she answered, appreciating the compliment.

The music started again. Under the trees the wooden floor was red in the sun. Josephine sang softly:

"'Lisibeth Ann-n,
I'm wild a-bow-ow-out you, a-bow-ow-out you—"

"Nice here," he murmured. "Just this time of day and that music under the trees. It's hot in Chicago!"

She was singing to him; the remarked triangle of her eyes and mouth was turned on him, faintly and sadly smiling, her low voice wooed him casually from some impersonal necessity of its own. Realizing it, she broke off, saying: "I've got to go to the city tomorrow. I've been putting it off."

"I bet you have a lot of men worried about you."

"Me? I just sit home and twirl my thumbs all day."

"Yes, you do."

"Everybody hates me and I return the compliment, so I'm going into a convent or else to be a trained nurse in the war. Will you enlist in the French Army and let me nurse you?"

Her words died away; his eyes, following hers, saw Mrs. McRae and her nephew coming in at the gate. "I'll go now," he said quickly. "You wouldn't have lunch with me if you come to Chicago tomorrow? I'll take you to a German place with fine food."

She hesitated; Mrs. McRae's insincerely tickled expression grew larger on the near distance.

"All right."

He wrote swiftly on a piece of paper and handed it to her. Then, lifting his big body awkwardly, he gallumped down the tier of seats, receiving a quick but inquisitive glance from Mrs. McRae as he lumbered past her.

II.

It was easy to arrange. Josephine phoned the aunt with whom she was to lunch, dropped the chauffeur and, not without a certain breathlessness, approached Hoftzer's Rathskeller Garten on North State Street. She wore a blue crepe-de-chine dress sprinkled with soft brown leaves that were the color of her eyes.

John Boynton Bailey was waiting in front of the restaurant, looking distracted, yet protective, and Josephine's uneasiness departed.

He said, "We don't want to eat in this place. It seemed all right when I thought about it, but I just looked inside, and you might get sawdust in your shoes. We better go to some hotel."

Agreeably she turned in the direction of a hotel sacred to tea dancing, but he shook his head.

"You'd meet a lot of your friends. Let's go to the old La Grange."

The old La Grange Hotel, once the pride of the Middle West, was now a rendezvous of small-town transients and a forum for traveling salesmen. The women in the lobby were either hard-eyed types from the Loop or powderless, transpiring mothers from the Mississippi Valley. There were spittoons in patient activity and a busy desk where men mouthed cigars grotesquely and waited for telephone calls.

In the big dining room, John Bailey and Josephine ordered grapefruit, club sandwiches and julienne potatoes. Josephine put her elbows on the table and regarded him as if to say: "Well, now I'm temporarily yours; make the most of your time."

"You're the best-looking girl I ever met," he began. "Of course you're tangled up in all this bogus society hokum, but you can't help that. You think that's sour grapes, but I'll tell you; when I hear people bragging about their social position and who they are, and all that, I just sit back and laugh. Because I happen to be descended directly from Charlemagne. What do you think of that?"

Josephine blushed for him, and he grew a little ashamed of his statement and qualified it:

"But I believe in men, not their ancestors. I want to be the best writer in the world, that's all."

"I love good books," Josephine offered.

"It's the theater that interests me. I've got a play now that I think would go big if the managers would bother to read it. I've got all the stuff—sometimes I walk along the streets so full of it that I feel I could just sail out over the city like a balloon." His mouth drooped suddenly. "It's because I haven't got anything to show yet that I talk like that."

"Mr. Bailey, the great playwright. You'll send me tickets to your plays, won't you?"

"Sure," he said abstractedly, "but by that time you'll be married to some boy from Yale or Harvard with a couple of hundred neckties and a good-looking car, and you'll get to be dumbbell like the rest."

"I guess I am already—but I simply love poetry. Did you ever read 'The Passing of Arthur'?"

"There's more good poetry being written now right in Chi than during the whole last century. There's a man named Carl Sandburg that's as great as Shakespeare."

She was not listening; she was watching him. His sensitive face was glowing with the same strange light as when she had first seen him.

"I like poetry and music better than anything in the world," she said. "They're wonderful."

He believed her, knowing that she spoke of her liking for him. She felt that he was distinguished, and by this she meant something definite and real; the possession of some particular and special passion for life. She knew that she herself was superior in something to the girls who criticized her—though she often confused her superiority with the homage it inspired—and she was apathetic to the judgments of the crowd. The distinction that at fifteen she had found in Travis de Coppet's ballroom romantics she discovered now in John Bailey, in spite of his assertiveness and his snobbishness. She wanted to look at life through his glasses, since he found it so absorbing and exciting. Josephine had developed early and lived hard—if that can be said of one whose face was cousin to a fresh, damp rose—and she had begun to find men less than satisfactory. The strong ones were dull, the clever ones were shy, and all too soon they were responding to Josephine with a fatal sameness, a lack of temperament that blurred their personalities.

The club sandwiches arrived and absorbed them; there was activity from an orchestra placed up near the ceiling in the fashion of twenty years before. Josephine, chewing modestly, looked around the room; just across from them a man and woman were getting up from table, and she started and made one big swallow. The woman was what was called a peroxide blonde, with doll's eyes boldly drawn on a baby-pink face. The sugary perfume that exuded from her garish clothes was almost visible as she preceded her escort to the door. Her escort was Josephine's father.

"Don't you want your potatoes?" John Bailey asked after a minute.

"I think they're very good," she said in a strained voice.

Her father, the cherished ideal of her life—handsome, charming Herbert Perry. Her mother's lover—through so many summer evenings had Josephine seen them in the swinging settee of the veranda, with his head on her lap, smoothing his hair. It was the promise of happiness in her parents' marriage that brought a certain purposefulness into all Josephine's wayward seeking.

Now to see him lunching safely out of the zone of his friends with such a woman! It was different with boys—she rather admired their loud tales of conquest in the nether world, but for her father, a grown man, to be like that. She was trembling; a tear fell and glistened on a fried potato.

"Yes, I'd like very much to go there," she heard herself saying.

"Of course, they are all very serious people," he explained defensively. "I think they've decided to produce my play in their little theater. If they haven't I'll give one or two of them a good sock on the jaw, so that next time they strike any literature they'll recognize it."

In the taxi Josephine tried to put out of her mind what she had seen at the hotel. Her home, the placid haven from which she had made her forays, seemed literally in ruins, and she dreaded her return. Awful, awful, awful!

In a panic she moved close to John Bailey, with the necessity of being near something strong. The car stopped before a new building of yellow stucco from which a blue-jowled, fiery-eyed young man came out.

"Well, what happened?" John demanded.

"The trap dropped at 11:30."

"Yes?"

"I wrote out his farewell speech like he asked me to, but he took too long and they wouldn't let him finish it."

"What a dirty trick on you."

"Wasn't it? Who's your friend?" The man indicated Josephine.

"Lake Forest stuff," said John, grinning. "Miss Perry, Mr. Blacht."

"Here for the triumph of the Springfield Shakespeare? But I hear they may do Uncle Tom's Cabin instead." He winked at Josephine. "So long."

"What did he mean?" she demanded as they went on.

"Why, he's on the Tribune and he had to cover a hanging this morning. What's more, he and I caught the fellow ourselves. Do you think these cops ever catch anybody?"

"This isn't a jail, is it?"

"Lord, no; this is the theater workshop."

"What did he mean about a speech?"

"He wrote the man a dying speech to sort of make up for having caught him."

"How perfectly hectic!" cried Josephine, awed.

They were in a long, dimly lit hall with a stage at one end; upon it, standing about in the murkiness of a few footlights, were a dozen people. Almost at once Josephine realized that everybody there except herself was crazy. She knew it incontrovertibly, although the only person of outward eccentricity was a robust woman in a frock coat and gray morning trousers. And in spite of the fact that of those present seven were later to attain notoriety, and four, actual distinction, Josephine was, for the moment, right. It was their intolerable inadjustability to their surroundings that had plucked them from lonely normal schools, from the frame rows of Midwestern towns and the respectability of shoddy suburbs, and brought them to Chicago in 1916—ignorant, wild with energy, doggedly sensitive and helplessly romantic, wanderers like their pioneer ancestors upon the face of the land.

"This is Miss—," said John Bailey, "and Mrs.—and Caroline—and Mr.—and—"

Their frightened eyes lifted to the young girl's elegant clothes, her confident, beautiful face, and they turned from her rudely in self-protection. Then gradually they came toward her, hinting of their artistic or economic ideals, naive as freshmen, unreticent as Rotarians. All but one, a handsome girl with a dirty neck and furtive eyes—eyes which, from the moment of Josephine's entrance, never left her face. Josephine listened to a flow of talk, rapt of expression, but only half comprehending and thinking often with sharp pain of her father. Her mind wandered to Lake Forest as if it were a place she had left long ago, and she heard the crack-pat-crack of the tennis balls in the still afternoon. Presently the people sat down on kitchen chairs and a gray-haired poet took the floor.

"The meeting of the committee this morning was to decide on our first production. There was some debate. Miss Hammerton's drama"—he bowed in the direction of the trousered lady—"received serious consideration, but since one of our benefactors is opposed to representations of the class war, we have postponed consideration of Miss Hammerton's powerful play until later."

At this point Josephine was startled to hear Miss Hammerton say "Boo!" in a large, angry voice, give a series of groans, varied as if to express the groans of many people—then clap on a soft gray hat and stride angrily from the room.

"Elsie takes it hard," said the chairman. "Unhappily, the benefactor I spoke of, whose identity you have doubtless guessed, is adamant on the subject—a thorough reactionary. So your committee have unanimously voted that our production shall be 'Race Riot', by John Boynton Bailey."

Josephine gasped congratulations. In the applause the girl with the furtive eyes brought her chair over and sat down beside Josephine.

"You live at Lake Forest," she said challengingly.

"In the summer."

"Do you know Emily Kohl?"

"No, I don't."

"I thought you were from Lake Forest."

"I live at Lake Forest," said Josephine, still pleasantly, "but I don't know Emily Kohl."

Rebuffed only for a moment, the girl continued, "I don't suppose all this means much to you."

"It's a sort of dramatic club, isn't it?" said Josephine.

"Dramatic club! Oh, gosh!" cried the girl. "Did you hear that? She thinks it's a dramatic club, like Miss Pinkerton's school." In a moment her uninfectious laughter died away, and she turned to the playwright. "How about it? Have you picked your cast?"

"Not yet," he said shortly, annoyed at the baiting of Josephine.

"I suppose you'll have Mrs. Fiske coming on from New York," the girl continued. "Come on, we're all on pins and needles. Who's going to be in it?"

"I'll tell you one thing, Evelyn. You're not."

She grew red with astonishment and anger. "Oho! When did you decide that?"

"Some time ago."

"Oho! How about all the lines I gave you for Clare?"

"I'll cut them tonight; there were only three. I'd rather not produce the thing than have you play Clare."

The others were listening now.

"Far be it from me," the girl began, her voice trembling a little, "far be it from me—"

Josephine saw that John Bailey's face was even whiter than usual. His mouth was hard and cold. Suddenly the girl got up, cried out, "You fool!" and hurried from the room.

With this second temperamental departure a certain depression settled on those remaining; presently the meeting broke up, convoked for next day.

"Let's take a walk," John said to Josephine as they came out into a different afternoon; the heat had lifted with the first breeze from Lake Michigan.

"Let's take a walk," John repeated. "That made me sort of sick—her talking to you like that."

"I didn't like her, but now I'm sorry for her. Who is she?"

"She's a newspaper woman," he answered vaguely. "Listen. How would you like to be in this play?"

"Oh, I couldn't—I've got to be in a play out at the Lake."

"Society stuff," he said, scornfully mimicking: "'Here come the jolly, jolly golfing girls. Maybe they'll sing us a song.' If you want to be in this thing of mine you can have the lead."

"But how do you know I could act?"

"Come on! With that voice of yours? Listen. The girl in the play is like you. This race riot is caused by two men, one black and one white. The black man is fed up with his black wife and in love with a high-yellow girl, and that makes him bitter, see? And the white man married too young and he's in the same situation. When they both get their domestic affairs straightened the race riot dies down, too, see?"

"It's very original," said Josephine breathlessly. "Which would I be?"

"You'd be the girl the married man was in love with."

"Is that the part that girl was going to play?"

"Yes." He frowned, and then added, "She's my wife."

"Oh—you're married?"

"I married young—like the man in my play. In one way it isn't so bad, because neither of us believed in the old-fashioned bourgeois marriage, living in the same apartment and all. She kept her own name. But we got to hate each other anyhow."

After the first shock was over, it did not seem so strange to Josephine that he was married; there had been a day two years before when only the conscientiousness of a rural justice had prevented Josephine from becoming Mrs. Travis de Coppet.

"We all get what's coming to us," he remarked.

They turned up the boulevard, passing the Blackstone, where faint dance music clung about the windows.

On the street the plate glass of a hundred cars, bound for the country or the North Shore, took the burning sunset, but the city would make shift without them, and Josephine's imagination rested here instead of following the cars; she thought of electric fans in little restaurants with lobsters on ice in the windows, and of pearly signs glittering and revolving against the obscure, urban sky, the hot, dark sky. And pervading everything, a terribly strange, brooding mystery of roof tops and empty apartments, of white dresses in the paths of parks, and fingers for stars and faces instead of moons, and people with strange people scarcely knowing one another's names.

A sensuous shiver went over Josephine, and she knew that the fact that John Bailey was married simply added to his attraction for her. Life broke up a little; barred and forbidden doors swung open, unmasking enchanted corridors. Was it that which drew her father, some call to adventure that she had from him?

"I wish there was some place we could go and be alone together," John Bailey said, and suddenly, "I wish I had a car."

But they were already alone, she thought. She had spun him out a background now that was all his—the summer streets of the city. They were alone here; when he kissed her, finally, they would be less alone. That would be his time; this was hers. Their mutually clinging arms pulled her close to his tall side.

A little later, sitting in the back of a movie with the yellow clock in the corner creeping fatally toward six, she leaned into the hollow of his rounded shoulder and his cool white cheek bent down to hers.

"I'm letting myself in for a lot of suffering," he whispered. She saw his black eyes thinking in the darkness and met them reassuringly with hers.

"I take things pretty hard," he went on. "And what in hell could we ever be to each other?"

She didn't answer. Instead she let the familiar lift and float and flow of love close around them, pulling him back from his far-away uniqueness with the pressure of her hand.

"What will your wife think if I take that part in your play?" she whispered.

***

At the same moment Josephine's wayward parent was being met by her mother at the Lake Forest Station.

"It's deathly hot in town," he said. "What a day!"

"Did you see her?"

"Yes, and after one look I took her to the La Grange for lunch. I wanted to preserve a few shreds of my reputation."

"Is it settled?"

"Yes. She's agreed to leave Will alone and stop using his name for three hundred a month for life. I wired your highly discriminating brother in Hawaii that he can come home."

"Poor Will," sighed Mrs. Perry.

III.

Three days later, in the cool of the evening, Josephine spoke to her father as he came out on the veranda.

"Daddy, do you want to back a play?"

"I never thought about it. I'd always thought I'd like to write one. Is Jenny McRae's vaudeville on the rocks?"

Josephine ticked impatiently with her tongue. "I'm not even going to be in the vaudeville. I'm talking about an attempt to do something fine. What I want to ask is: What would be your possible objections to backing it?"

"My objections?"

"What would they be?"

"You haven't given me time to drum up any."

"I should think you'd want to do something decent with your money."

"What's the play?" He sat down beside her, and she moved just slightly away from him.

"Mother knows some of the patronesses and it's absolutely all right. But the man who was going to be the backer is very narrow and wants to make a lot of changes that would ruin the whole thing; so they want to find another backer."

"What's it about?"

"Oh, the play's all right, don't you worry," she assured him. "The man that wrote it is still alive, but the play is a part of English literature."

He considered. "Well, if you're going to be in it, and your mother thinks it all right, I'd put up a couple of hundred."

"A couple of hundred!" she exclaimed. "A man who goes around throwing away his money like you do! They need at least a thousand."

"Throwing away my money?" he repeated. "What on earth are you talking about?"

"You know what I'm talking about." It seemed to her that he winced slightly, that his voice was uncertain as he said:

"If you mean the way we live, it doesn't seem quite tactful to reproach me about that."

"I don't mean that." Josephine hesitated; then without premeditation took a sudden plunge into blackmail: "I should think you'd rather not have me soil my hands by discussing—"

Mrs. Perry's footsteps sounded in the hall, and Josephine rose quickly. The car rolled up the drive.

"I hope you'll go to bed early," her mother said.

"Lillian and some kids are coming over."

Josephine and her father exchanged a short, hostile glance before the machine drove off.

It was a harvest night, bright enough to read by. Josephine sat on the veranda steps listening to the tossing of sleepless birds, the rattle of a last dish in the kitchen, the sad siren of the Chicago-Milwaukee train. Composed and tranquil, she sat waiting for the telephone; he could not see her there, so she saw herself for him—it was almost the same.

She considered the immediate future in all its gorgeous possibilities—the first night, with the audience whispering: "Do you realize that's the Perry girl?" With the final curtain, tumultuous applause and herself, with arms full of flowers, leading forth a tall, shy man who would say: "I owe it all to her." And Mrs. McRae's furious face in the audience, and the remorseful face of Miss Brereton, of the Brereton School, who happened to be in town. "Had I but known her genius, I wouldn't have acted as I did." Comments jubilant and uproarious from every side: "The greatest young actress on the American stage!"

Then the move to a larger theater; great, staring, electric letters, JOSEPHINE PERRY IN RACE RIOT. "No, father, I'm not going back to school. This is my education and my debut." And her father's answer:

"Well, little girl, I'll have to admit it was a lucky speculation for me to put up that money."

If the figure of John Bailey became a little dim during the latter part of this reverie, it was because the reverie itself opened out to vaguer and vaguer horizons, to return always to that opening night from which it started once more.

Lillian, Travis and Ed came, but she was hardly aware of them, listening for the telephone. They sat, as they had so often, in a row on the steps, surrounded, engulfed, drowned in summer. But they were growing up and the pattern was breaking; they were absorbed in secret destinies of their own, no matter how friendly their voices or how familiar their laughter in the silence. Josephine's boredom with a discussion of the tournament turned to irascibility; she told Travis de Coppet that he smelled of onions.

"I won't eat any onions when we rehearse for the vaudeville," he said.

"You won't be rehearsing with me, because I'm not being in it. I've got a little tired of 'Here come the jolly golfing girls. Hurray!'"

The phone rang and she excused herself.

"Are you alone?"

"There're some people here—that I've known all my life."

"Don't kiss anybody. I don't mean that—go kiss anybody you want to."

"I don't want to." She felt her own lips' warmth in the mouthpiece of the phone.

"I'm out in a pay station. She came up to my room in a crazy humor and I got out."

Josephine didn't answer; something went out of her when he spoke of his wife.

When she went back on the porch her guests, sensing her abstraction, were on their feet.

"No. We want to go. You bore us too."

Her parents' car pursued Ed's around the circular drive. Her father motioned that he wanted to see her alone.

"I didn't quite understand about my spending my money. Is this a Socialist bunch?"

"I told you that mother knew some of the—"

"But who is it you know? The fellow who wrote the play?"

"Yes."

"Where did you meet him?"

"Just around."

"He asked you to raise the money?"

"No."

"I'd certainly like to have a talk with him before you go into this any further. Invite him out to luncheon Saturday?"

"All right," she agreed unwillingly. "If you don't taunt him about his poverty and his ragged clothes."

"What a thing to accuse me of!"

It was with a deep uneasiness that, next Saturday, Josephine drove her roadster to the station. She was relieved to see that he had had a haircut, and he looked very big and powerful and distinguished among the tennis crowd as he got off the train. But finding him nervous, she drove around Lake Forest for half an hour.

"Whose house is that?" he kept asking. "Who are these two people you just spoke to?"

"Oh, I don't know; just somebody. There'll be nobody at lunch, but the family and a boy named Howard Page I've known for years."

"These boys you've known for years," he sighed. "Why wasn't I one?"

"But you don't want to be that. You want to be the best writer in the world."

In the Perrys' living room John Bailey stared at a photograph of bridesmaids at her sister's wedding the previous summer. Then Howard Page, a junior at New Haven, arrived and they talked of the tennis: Mrs. McRae's nephew had done brilliantly and was conceded a chance in the finals this afternoon. When Mrs. Perry came downstairs, just before luncheon, John Bailey could not help turning his back on her suddenly and walking up and down to pretend he was at home. He knew in his heart he was better than these people, and he couldn't bear that they should not know it.

The maid called him to the telephone, and Josephine overheard him say, "I can't help it. You have no right to call me here." It was because of the existence of his wife that she had not let him kiss her, but had fitted him, instead, into her platonic reverie, which should endure until Providence set him free.

At luncheon she was relieved to see John Bailey and her father take a liking to each other. John was expert and illuminating about the race riots, and she saw how thin and meager Howard Page was beside him.

Again John Bailey was summoned to the phone; this time he left the room with an exclamation, said three words into the mouthpiece and hung up with a sharp click.

Back at table, he whispered to Josephine: "Will you tell the maid to say I'm gone if she calls again?"

Josephine was in argument with her mother: "I don't see the use of coming out if I could be an actress instead."

"Why should she come out?" her father agreed. "Hasn't she done enough rushing around?"

"But certainly she's to finish school. There's a course in dramatic art and every year they give a play."

"What do they give?" demanded Josephine scornfully. "Shakespeare or something like that! Do you realize there are at least a dozen poets right here in Chicago that are better than Shakespeare?"

John Bailey demurred with a laugh. "Oh, no. One maybe."

"I think a dozen," insisted the eager convert.

"In Billy Phelps' course at Yale—" began Howard Page, but Josephine said vehemently:

"Anyhow, I don't think you ought to wait till people are dead before you recognize them. Like mother does."

"I do no such thing," objected Mrs. Perry. "Did I say that, Howard?"

"In Billy Phelps' course at Yale—" began Howard again, but this time Mr. Perry interrupted:

"We're getting off the point. This young man wants my daughter in his play. If there's nothing disgraceful in the play I don't object."

"In Billy—"

"But I don't want Josephine in anything sordid."

"Sordid!" Josephine glared at him. "Don't you think there are plenty of sordid things right here in Lake Forest, for instance?"

"But they don't touch you," her father said.

"Don't they, though?"

"No," he said firmly. "Nothing sordid touches you. If it does, then it's your own fault." He turned to John Bailey. "I understand you need money."

John flushed. "We do. But don't think—"

"That's all right. We've stood behind the opera here for many years and I'm not afraid of things simply because they're new. We know some women on your committee and I don't suppose they'd stand for any nonsense. How much do you need?"

"About two thousand dollars."

"Well, you raise half and I'll raise half—on two conditions: First, my name kept entirely out of it and my daughter's name not played up in any way; second, you assure me personally that she doesn't play any questionable part or have any speeches to make that might offend her mother."

John Bailey considered. "That last is a large order," he said. "I don't know what would offend her mother. There wouldn't be any cursing to do, for instance. There's not a bit in the whole damn play."

He flushed slowly at their laughter.

"Nothing sordid is going to touch Josephine unless she steps into it herself," said Mr. Perry.

"I see your point," John Bailey said.

Lunch was over. For some moments Mrs. Perry had been glancing toward the hall, where some loud argument was taking place.

"Shall we—"

They had scarcely crossed the threshold of the living room when the maid appeared, followed by a local personage in a vague uniform of executive blue.

"Hello, Mr. Kelly. You going to take us into custody?"

Kelly hesitated awkwardly. "Is there a Mr. Bailey?"

John, who had wandered off, swung about sharply. "What?"

"There's an important message for you. They've been trying to get you here, but they couldn't, so they telephoned the constable—that's me." He beckoned him, and then, talking to him, tried at the same time to urge him, with nods of his head, toward the privacy of outdoors; his voice, though lowered, was perfectly audible to everybody in the room.

"The St. Anthony's Hospital—your wife slashed both her wrists and turned the gas on—they want you as soon as you can get there." The voice pitched higher as they went through the door: "They don't know yet—If there's no train, you can get a car—" They were both outside now, walking fast down the path. Josephine saw John trip and grasp clumsily at the edge that bordered the gate, and then go on with great strides toward the constable's flivver. The constable was running to keep up with him.

IV.

After a few minutes, when John Bailey's trouble had died away in the distance, they all stopped being stunned and behaved like people again. Mr. and Mrs. Perry were panicky as to how far Josephine was involved; then they became angry at John Bailey for coming there with disaster hanging over him.

Mr. Perry demanded: "Did you know he was married?"

Josephine was crying; her mouth was drawn; he looked away from her.

"They lived separately," she whispered.

"She seemed to know he was out here."

"Of course he's a newspaperman," said her mother, "so he can probably keep it out of the papers. Or do you think you ought to do something, Herbert?"

"I was just wondering."

Howard Page got up awkwardly, not wanting to say he was now going to the tennis finals. Mr. Perry went to the door and talked earnestly for a few minutes, and Howard nodded.

Half an hour passed. Several callers drifted by in cars, but received word that no one was at home. Josephine felt something throbbing on the heat of the summer afternoon; and at first she thought it was pity and then remorse, but finally she knew what the throbbing was. "I must push this thing away from me," it said; "this thing must not touch me. I hardly met his wife. He told me—"

And now John Bailey began slipping away. Who was he but a chance encounter, someone who had spoken to her a week before about a play he had written? He had nothing to do with her.

At four o'clock Mr. Perry went to the phone and called St. Anthony's Hospital; only when he asked for an official whom he knew did he get the information: In the actual face of death, Mrs. Bailey had phoned for the police, and it now seemed that they had reached her in time. She had lost blood, but barring complications—

Now, in the relief, the parents grew angry with Josephine as with a child who has toddled under galloping horses.

"What I can't understand is why you should have to know people like that. Is it necessary to go into the back streets of Chicago?"

"That young man had no business here," her father thundered grimly, "and he knew it."

"But who was he?" wailed Mrs. Perry.

"He told me he was a descendant of Charlemagne," said Josephine.

Mr. Perry grunted. "Well, we want no more of Charlemagne's descendants here. Young people had better stay with their own kind until they can distinguish one from another. You let married men alone."

But now Josephine was herself again. She stood up, her eyes hardening.

"Oh, you make me sick," she cried—"a married man! As if there weren't a lot of married men who met other women besides their wives."

Unable to bear another scene, Mrs. Perry withdrew. Once she was out of hearing, Josephine came out into the open at last: "You're a fine one to talk to me."

"Now look here; you said that the other night, and I don't like it now any better than I did then. What do you mean?"

"I suppose you've never been to lunch with anybody at the La Grange Hotel."

"The La Grange—" The truth broke over him slowly. "Why—" He began laughing. Then he swore suddenly, and going quickly to the foot of the stairs, called his wife.

"You sit down," he said to Josephine. "I'm going to tell you a story."

Half an hour later Miss Josephine Perry left her house and set off for the tennis tournament. She wore one of the new autumn gowns with the straight line, but having a looped effect at the sides of the skirt, and fluffy white cuffs. Some people she met just outside the stands told her that Mrs. McRae's nephew was weakening to the veteran, and this started her thinking of Mrs. McRae and of her decision about the vaudeville with a certain regret. People would think it odd if she wasn't in it.

There was a sudden burst of wild clapping as she went in; the tournament was over. The crowd was swarming around victor and vanquished in the central court, and gravitating with it, she was swept by an eddy to the very front of it, until she was face to face with Mrs. McRae's nephew himself. But she was equal to the occasion. With her most sad and melting smile, as if she had hoped for him from day to day, she held out her hand and spoke to him in her clear, vibrant voice:

"We are all awfully sorry."

For a moment, even in the midst of the excited crowd, a hushed silence fell. Modestly, conscious of her personality, Josephine backed away, aware that he was staring after her, his mouth stupidly open, aware of a burst of laughter around her. Travis de Coppet appeared beside her.

"Well, of all the nuts!" he cried.

"What's the matter? What—"

"Sorry! Why, he won! It was the greatest come-back I ever saw."


So, at the vaudeville, Josephine sat with her family after all. Looking around during the show, she saw John Bailey standing in the rear. He looked very sad, and she felt very sorry, realizing that he had come in hopes of a glimpse of her. He would see, at least, that she was not up there on the stage debasing herself with such inanities.

Then she caught her breath as the lights changed, the music quickened and at the head of the steps, Travis de Coppet in white-satin football suit swung into the spotlight a shimmering blonde in a dress of autumn leaves. It was Madelaine Danby, and it was the role Josephine would have played. With the warm rain of intimate applause, Josephine decided something: That any value she might have was in the immediate, shimmering present—and thus thinking, she threw in her lot with the rich and powerful of this world forever.


THE END

 

 

 

About the Author 

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald (1896 - 1940), better known as F. Scott Fitzgerald, was an American author of novels and short stories, born in St. Paul, Minnesota, and raised in an Irish middle class family. He is best known for his masterpiece, The Great Gatsby and Tender Is the Night.

The author was named after his famous second cousin, Francis Scott Key, who penned The Star Spangled Banner.

Fitzgerald's prolific short stories tend to center around the promise of youth, followed by the effects of age and despair. Fitzgerald was considered one of the best authors of the twentieth century, a leading voice for the "Lost Generation" of the 1920s and the Jazz Age.

F. Scott Fitzgerald spent a great deal of his youth in Buffalo, New York, then moved to New Jersey to attend Princeton University. Fitzgerald dropped out and enlisted in the U.S. Army in 1917 on the brink of World War I, but did not see combat. He became an officer, married, and after being decommissioned, went to New York City to pursue his literary career. This Side of Paradise was his first successful novel, allowing him to travel extensively in Paris and the French Riviera in the 1920s, creating the backdrop for his most widely-acclaimed work, The Great Gatsby which was published in 1925. He befriended great authors such as Ernest Hemingway during this period. Fitzgerald contributed stories to The Saturday Evening Post for most of his career. The first story in which his name appeared on the cover was Bernice Bobs Her Hair (1920).

Fitzgerald was in poor health after spending most of his adulthood abusing alcohol and suffered three heart attacks. He died at the age of 44 in 1941.

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Presumption by F Scott Fitzgerald

 

Presumption

by

F Scott Fitzgerald


Published in Saturday Evening Post, 9 January 1926.


Sitting by the window and staring out into the early autumn dusk, San Juan Chandler remembered only that Noel was coming tomorrow; but when, with a romantic sound that was half gasp, half sigh, he turned from the window, snapped on the light and looked at himself in the mirror, his expression became more materially complicated. He leaned closer. Delicacy balked at the abominable word "pimple," but some such blemish had undoubtedly appeared on his cheek within the last hour, and now formed, with a pair from last week, a distressing constellation of three. Going into the bathroom adjoining his room—Juan had never possessed a bathroom to himself before—he opened a medicine closet, and, after peering about, carefully extracted a promising-looking jar of black ointment and covered each slight protuberance with a black gluey mound. Then, strangely dotted, he returned to the bedroom, put out the light and resumed his vigil over the shadowy garden.

He waited. That roof among the trees on the hill belonged to Noel Garneau's house. She was coming back to it tomorrow; he would see her there...A loud clock on the staircase inside struck seven. Juan went to the glass and removed the ointment with a handkerchief. To his chagrin the spots were still there, even slightly irritated from the chemical sting of the remedy. That settled it—no more chocolate malted milks or eating between meals during his visit to Culpepper Bay. Taking the lid from the jar of talcum he had observed on the dressing table, he touched the laden puff to his cheek. Immediately his brows and lashes bloomed with snow and he coughed chokingly, observing that the triangle of humiliation was still observable upon his otherwise handsome face.

"Disgusting," he muttered to himself. "I never saw anything so disgusting." At twenty, such childish phenomena should be behind him.

Downstairs three gongs, melodious and metallic, hummed and sang. He listened for a moment, fascinated. Then he wiped the powder from his face, ran a comb through his yellow hair and went down to dinner.

Dinner at Cousin Cora's he had found embarrassing. She was so stiff and formal about things like that, and so familiar about Juan's private affairs. The first night of his visit he had tried politely to pull out her chair and bumped into the maid; the second night he remembered the experience—but so did the maid, and Cousin Cora seated herself unassisted. At home Juan was accustomed to behave as he liked; like all children of deferent and indulgent mothers, he lacked both confidence and good manners. Tonight there were guests. "This is San Juan Chandler, my cousin's son—Mrs Holyoke—and Mr. Holyoke."

The phrase "my cousin's son" seemed to explain him away, seemed to account for his being in Miss Chandler's house: "You understand—we must have our poor relations with us occasionally." But a tone which implied that would be rude—and certainly Cousin Cora, with all her social position, couldn't be rude.

Mr and Mrs Holyoke acknowledged the introduction politely and coolly and dinner was served.

The conversation, dictated by Cousin Cora, bored Juan. It was about the garden and about her father, for whom she lived and who was dying slowly and unwillingly upstairs. Towards the salad Juan was wedged into the conversation by a question from Mr Holyoke and a quick look from his cousin.

"I'm just staying for a week," he answered politely; "then I've got to go home because college opens pretty soon."

"Where are you at college?"

Juan named his college, adding almost apologetically, "You see, my father went there."

He wished that he could have answered that he was at Yale or Princeton, where he wanted to go.

He was prominent at Henderson and belonged to a good fraternity, but it annoyed him when people occasionally failed to recognize his alma mater's name.

"I suppose you've met all the young people here," supposed Mrs Holyoke, "—my daughter?"

"Oh, yes—" her daughter was the dumpy, ugly girl with the thick spectacles. "Oh, yes." And he added, "I knew some people who lived here before I came."

"The little Garneau girl," explained Cousin Cora.

"Oh, yes. Noel Garneau," agreed Mrs Holyoke. "Her mother's a great beauty. How old is Noel now? She must be—"

"Seventeen," supplied Juan; "but she's old for her age."

"Juan met her on a ranch last summer. They were on a ranch together. What is it that they call those ranches, Juan?"

"Dude ranches."

"Dude ranches. Juan and another boy worked for their board." Juan saw no reason why Cousin Cora should have supplied this information; she continued on an even more annoying note: "Noel's mother sent her out there to keep her out of mischief, but Juan says the ranch was pretty gay itself."

Mr Holyoke supplied a welcome change of subject.

"Your name is—" he inquired, smiling and curious.

"San Juan Chandler. My father was wounded in the battle of San Juan Hill and so they called me after it—like Kenesaw Mountain Landis."

He had explained this so many times that the sentences rolled off automatically—in school he had been called Santy, in college he was Don.

"You must come to dinner while you're here," said Mrs Holyoke vaguely.

The conversation slipped away from him as he realized freshly, strongly, that Noel would arrive tomorrow. And she was coming because he was here. She had cut short a visit in the Adirondacks on receipt of his letter. Would she like him now—in this place that was so different from Montana? There was a spaciousness, an air of money and pleasure about Culpepper for which San Juan Chandler—a shy, handsome, spoiled, brilliant, Penniless boy from a small Ohio city—was unprepared. At home, where father was a retired clergyman, Juan went with the nice people. He didn't realize until this visit to a fashionable New England resort that where there are enough rich families to form a self-sufficient and exclusive group, such a group is invariably formed. On the dude ranch they had all dressed alike; here his ready-made Prince of Wales suit seemed exaggerated in style, his hat correct only in theory—an imitation hat—his very ties only projections of the ineffable Platonic ties which were worn here at Culpepper Bay. Yet all the differences were so small that he was unable quite to discern them.

But from the morning three days ago when he had stepped off the train into a group of young people who were waiting at the station for some friend of their own, he had been uneasy; and Cousin Cora's introductions, which seemed to foist him horribly upon whomever he was introduced to, did not lessen his discomfort. He thought mechanically that she was being kind, and considered himself lucky that her invitation had coincided with his wild desire to see Noel Garneau again. He did not realize that in three days he had come to hate Cousin Cora's cold and snobbish patronage.

Noel's fresh, adventurous voice on the telephone next morning made his own voice quiver with nervous happiness. She would call for him at two and they would spend the afternoon together. All morning he lay in the garden, trying unsuccessfully to renew his summer tan in the mild lemon light of the September sun, sitting up quickly whenever he heard the sound of Cousin Cora's garden shears at the end of a neighbouring border. He was back in his room, still meddling desperately with the white powder puff, when Noel's roadster stopped outside and she came up the front walk. Noel's eyes were dark blue, almost violet, and her lips, Juan had often thought, were like very small, very soft, red cushions—only cushions sounded all wrong, for they were really the most delicate lips in the world. When she talked they parted to the shape of "Oo!" and her eyes opened wide as though she was torn between tears and laughter at the poignancy of what she was saying. Already, at seventeen, she knew that men hung on her words in a way that frightened her. To Juan her most indifferent remarks assumed a highly ponderable significance and begot an intensity in him—a fact which Noel had several times found somewhat of a strain. He ran downstairs, down the gravel path towards her. "Noel, my dear," he wanted so much to say, "you are the loveliest thing—the loveliest thing. My heart turns over when I see your beautiful face and smell that sweet fresh smell you have around you." That would have been the precious, the irreplaceable truth. Instead he faltered, "Why, hello, Noel! How are you?...Well, I certainly am glad. Well, is this your car? What kind is it? Well, you certainly look fine." And he couldn't look at her, because when he did his face seemed to him to be working idiotically—like someone else's face. He got in, they drove off and he made a mighty effort to compose himself; but as her hand left the steering wheel to fall lightly on his, a perverse instinct made him jerk his hand away. Noel perceived the embarrassment and was puzzled and—sorry.

They went to the tennis tournament at the Culpepper Club. He was so little aware of anything except Noel that later he told Cousin Cora they hadn't seen the tennis, and believed it himself. Afterwards they loitered about the grounds, stopped by innumerable people who welcomed Noel home. Two men made him uneasy—one a small handsome youth of his own age with shining brown eyes that were bright as the glass eyes of a stuffed owl; the other a tall, languid dandy of twenty-five who was introduced to her, Juan rightly deduced, at his own request.

When they were in a group of girls he was more comfortable. He was able to talk, because being with Noel gave him confidence before these others, and his confidence before the others made him more confident with Noel. The situation improved.

There was one girl, a sharp, pretty blonde named Holly Morgan, with whom he had spent some facetiously sentimental hours the day before, and in order to show Noel that he had been able to take care of himself before her return he made a point of talking aside to Holly Morgan. Holly was not responsive. Juan was Noel's property, and though Holly liked him, she did not like him nearly well enough to annoy Noel.

"What time do you want me for dinner, Noel?" she asked.

"Eight o'clock," said Noel. "Billy Harper'll call for you."

Juan felt a twinge of disappointment. He had thought that he and Noel were to be alone for dinner; that afterwards they would have a long talk on the dark veranda and he would kiss her lips as he had upon that never-to-be-forgotten Montana night, and give her his DKE pin to wear. Perhaps the others would leave early—he had told Holly Morgan of his love for Noel; she should have sense enough to know.

At twilight Noel dropped him at Miss Chandler's gate, lingered for a moment with the engine cut off. The promise of the evening—the first lights in the houses along the bay, the sound of a remote piano, the little coolness in the wind—swung them both up suddenly into that paradise which Juan, drunk with ecstasy and terror, had been unable to evoke.

"Are you glad to see me?" she whispered.

"Am I glad?" The words trembled on his tongue. Miserably he struggled to bend his emotion into a phrase, a look, a gesture, but his mind chilled at the thought that nothing, nothing, nothing could express what he felt in his heart.

"You embarrass me," he said wretchedly. "I don't know what to say." Noel waited, attuned to what she expected, sympathetic, but too young quite to see that behind the mask of egotism, of moody childishness, which the intensity of Juan's devotion compelled him to wear, there was a tremendous emotion.

"Don't be embarrassed," Noel said. She was listening to the music now a tune they had danced to in the Adirondacks. The wings of a trance folded about her and the inscrutable someone who waited always in the middle distance loomed down over her with passionate words and dark romantic eyes. Almost mechanically, she started the engine and slipped the gear into first.

"At eight o'clock," she said, almost abstractedly. "Good-bye, Juan." The car moved off down the road. At the corner she turned and waved her hand and Juan waved back, happier than he had ever been in his life, his soul dissolved to a sweet gas that buoyed up his body like a balloon. Then the roadster was out of sight and, all unaware, he had lost her.

II

Cousin Cora's chauffeur took him to Noel's door. The other male guest, Billy Harper, was, he discovered, the young man with the bright brown eyes whom he had met that afternoon. Juan was afraid of him; he was on such familiar, facetious terms with the two girls—towards Noel his attitude seemed almost irreverent—that Juan was slighted during the conversation at dinner. They talked of the Adirondacks and they all seemed to know the group who had been there. Noel and Holly spoke of boys at Cambridge and New Haven and of how wonderful it was that they were going to school in New York this whiter. Juan meant to invite Noel to the autumn dance at his college, but he thought that he had better wait and do it in a letter, later on. He was glad when dinner was over.

The girls went upstairs. Juan and Billy Harper smoked.

"She certainly is attractive," broke out Juan suddenly, his repression bursting into words.

"Who? Noel?"

"Yes."

"She's a nice girl," agreed Harper gravely.

Juan fingered the DKE pin in his pocket.

"She's wonderful," he said. "I like Holly Morgan pretty well—I was handing her a sort of line yesterday afternoon—but Noel's really the most attractive girl I ever knew."

Harper looked at him curiously, but Juan, released from the enforced and artificial smile of dinner, continued enthusiastically: "Of course it's silly to fool with two girls. I mean, you've got to be careful not to get in too deep."

Billy Harper didn't answer. Noel and Holly came downstairs. Holly suggested bridge, but Juan didn't play bridge, so they sat talking by the fire. In some fashion Noel and Billy Harper became involved in a conversation about dates and friends, and Juan began boasting to Holly Morgan, who sat beside him on the sofa.

"You must come to a prom at college," he said suddenly. "Why don't you? It's a small college, but we have the best bunch in our house and the proms are fun."

"I'd love it."

"You'd only have to meet the people in our house."

"What's that?

"DKE." He drew the pin from his pocket. "See?"

Holly examined it, laughed and handed it back.

"I wanted to go to Yale," he went on, "but my family always go to the same place."

"I love Yale," said Holly.

"Yes," he agreed vaguely, half hearing her, his mind moving between himself and Noel. "You must come up. I'll write you about it."

Time passed. Holly played the piano. Noel took a ukulele from the top of the piano, strummed it and hummed. Billy Harper turned the pages of the music. Juan listened, restless, unamused. Then they sauntered out into the dark garden, and finding himself beside Noel at last, Juan walked her quickly ahead until they were alone.

"Noel," he whispered, "here's my Deke pin. I want you to have it."

She looked at him expressionlessly.

"I saw you offering it to Holly Morgan," she said.

"Noel," he cried in alarm, "I wasn't offering it to her. I just showed it to her. Why, Noel, do you think—"

"You invited her to the prom."

"I didn't. I was just being nice to her."

The others were close behind. She took the Deke pin quickly and put her finger to his lips in a facile gesture of caress.

He did not realize that she had not been really angry about the pin or the prom, and that his unfortunate egotism was forfeiting her interest.

At eleven o'clock Holly said she must go, and Billy Harper drove his car to the front door.

"I'm going to stay a few minutes if you don't mind," said Juan, standing in the door with Noel. "I can walk home."

Holly and Billy Harper drove away. Noel and Juan strolled back into the drawing-room, where she avoided the couch and sat down in a chair.

"Let's go out on the veranda," suggested Juan uncertainly.

"Why?"

"Please, Noel."

Unwillingly she obeyed. They sat side by side on a canvas settee and he put his arm around her.

"Kiss me," he whispered. She had never seemed so desirable to him before.

"No."

"Why not?"

"I don't want to. I don't kiss people any more."

"But—me?" he demanded incredulously.

"I've kissed too many people. I'll have nothing left if I keep on kissing people."

"But you'll kiss me, Noel?"

"Why?"

He could not even say, "Because I love you." But he could say it, he knew that he could say it, when she was in his arms.

"If I kiss you once, will you go home?"

"Why, do you want me to go home?"

"I'm tired. I was travelling last night and I can never sleep on a train. Can you? I can never—"

Her tendency to leave the subject willingly made him frantic.

"Then kiss me once," he insisted.

"You promise?"

"You kiss me first."

"No, Juan, you promise first."

"Don't you want to kiss me?"

"Oh-h-h!" she groaned.

With gathering anxiety Juan promised and took her in his arms. For one moment at the touch of her lips, the feeling of her, of Noel, close to him, he forgot the evening, forgot himself—rather became the inspired, romantic self that she had known. But it was too late. Her hands were on his shoulders, pushing him away.

"You promised."

"Noel—"

She got up. Confused and unsatisfied, he followed her to the door.

"Noel—"

"Good night, Juan."

As they stood on the doorstep her eyes rose over the line of dark trees towards the ripe harvest moon. Some glowing thing would happen to her soon, she thought, her mind far away. Something that would dominate her, snatch her up out of life, helpless, ecstatic, exalted.

"Good night, Noel. Noel, please—"

"Good night, Juan. Remember we're going swimming tomorrow. It's wonderful to see you again. Good night."

She closed the door.

III

Towards morning he awoke from a broken sleep, wondering if she had not kissed him because of the three spots on his cheek. He turned on the light and looked at them. Two were almost invisible. He went into the bathroom, doused all three with the black ointment and crept back into bed. Cousin Cora greeted him stiffly at breakfast next morning.

"You kept your great-uncle awake last night," she said. "He heard you moving around in your room."

"I only moved twice," he said unhappily. "I'm terribly sorry."

"He has to have his sleep, you know. We all have to be more considerate when there's someone sick. Young people don't always think of that. And he was so unusually well when you came."

It was Sunday, and they were to go swimming at Holly Morgan's house, where a crowd always collected on the bright easy beach. Noel called for him, but they arrived before any of his half-humble remarks about the night before had managed to attract her attention. He spoke to those he knew and was introduced to others, made ill at ease again by their cheerful familiarity with one another, by the correct informality of their clothes. He was sure they noticed that he had worn only one suit during his visit to Culpepper Bay, varying it with white flannel trousers. Both pairs of trousers were out of press now, and after keeping his greatuncle awake he had not felt like bothering Cousin Cora about it at breakfast.

Again he tried to talk to Holly, with the vague idea of making Noel jealous, but Holly was busy and she eluded him. It was ten minutes before he extricated himself from a conversation with the obnoxious Miss Holyoke. At the moment he managed this he perceived to his horror that Noel was gone.

When he last saw her she had been engaged in a light but somehow intent conversation with the tall well-dressed stranger she had met yesterday. Now she wasn't in sight. Miserable and horribly alone, he strolled up and down the beach, trying to look as if he were having a good time, seeming to watch the bathers, but keeping a sharp eye out for Noel. He felt that his self-conscious perambulations were attracting unbearable attention and sat down unhappily on a sand dune beside Billy Harper. But Billy Harper was neither cordial nor communicative, and after a minute hailed a man across the beach and went to talk to him.

Juan was desperate. When, suddenly, he spied Noel coming down from the house with the tall man, he stood up with a jerk, convinced that his features were working wildly. She waved at him.

"A buckle came off my shoe," she called. "I went to have it put on. I thought you'd gone in swimming."

He stood perfectly still, not trusting his voice to answer. He understood that she was through with him; there was someone else. Immediately he wanted above all things to be away. As they came nearer, the tall man glanced at him negligently and resumed his vivacious, intimate conversation with Noel. A group suddenly closed around them.

Keeping the group in the corner of his eye, Juan began to move carefully and steadily towards the gate that led to the road. He started when the casual voice of a man behind him said, "Going?" and he answered, "Got to," with what purported to be a reluctant nod. Once behind the shelter of the parked cars, he began to run, slowed down as several chauffeurs looked at him curiously. It was a mile and a half to the Chandler house and the day was broiling, but he walked fast lest Noel, leaving the party—"With that man," he thought bitterly—should overtake him trudging along the road. That would be more than he could bear.

There was the sound of a car behind him. Immediately Juan left the road and sought concealment behind a convenient hedge. It was no one from the party, but thereafter he kept an eye out for available cover, walking fast, or even running, over unpromising open spaces.

He was within sight of his cousin's house when it happened. Hot and dishevelled, he had scarcely flattened himself against the back of a tree when Noel's roadster, with the tall man at the wheel, flashed by down the road. Juan stepped out and looked after them. Then, blind with sweat and misery, he continued on towards home.

IV

At luncheon, Cousin Cora looked at him closely.

"What's the trouble?" she inquired. "Did something go wrong at the beach this morning?"

"Why, no," he exclaimed in simulated astonishment. "What made you think that?"

"You have such a funny look. I thought perhaps you'd had some trouble with the little Garneau girl."

He hated her.

"No, not at all."

"You don't want to get any idea in your head about her," said Cousin Cora.

"What do you mean?" He knew with a start what she meant.

"Any ideas about Noel Garneau. You've got your own way to make." Juan's face burned. He was unable to answer. "I say that in all kindness. You're not in any position to think anything serious about Noel Garneau."

Her implications cut deeper than her words. Oh, he had seen well enough that he was not essentially of Noel's sort, that being nice in Akron wasn't enough at Culpepper Bay. He had that realization that comes to all boys in his position that for every advantage—that was what his mother called this visit to Cousin Cora's—he paid a harrowing price in self-esteem. But a world so hard as to admit such an intolerable state of affairs was beyond his comprehension. His mind rejected it all completely, as it had rejected the dictionary name for the three spots on his face. He wanted to let go, to vanish, to be home. He determined to go home tomorrow, but after this heart-rending conversation he decided to put off the announcement until tonight.

That afternoon he took a detective story from the library and retired upstairs to read on his bed. He finished the book by four o'clock and came down to change it for another. Cousin Cora was on the veranda arranging three tables for tea.

"I thought you were at the club," she exclaimed in surprise. "I thought you'd gone up to the club."

"I'm tired," he said. "I thought I'd read."

"Tired!" she exclaimed. "A boy your age! You ought to be out in the open air playing golf—that's why you have that spot on your cheek—" Juan winced; his experiments with the black salve had irritated it to a sharp redness—"instead of lying around reading on a day like this."

"I haven't any clubs," said Juan hurriedly.

"Mr Holyoke told you you could use his brother's clubs. He spoke to the caddie master. Run on now. You'll find lots of young people up there who want to play. I'll begin to think you're not having a good time."

In agony Juan saw himself dubbing about the course alone—seeing Noel coming under his eye. He never wanted to see Noel again except out in Montana—some bright day, when she would come saying, "Juan, I never knew—never understood what your love was."

Suddenly he remembered that Noel had gone into Boston for the afternoon. She would not be there. The horror of playing alone suddenly vanished.

The caddie master looked at him disapprovingly as he displayed his guest card, and Juan nervously bought a half-dozen balls at a dollar each in an effort to neutralize the imagined hostility. On the first tee he glanced around. It was after four and there was no one in sight except two old men practising drives from the top of a little hill. As he addressed his ball he heard someone come up on the tee behind him and he breathed easier at the sharp crack that sent his ball a hundred and fifty yards down the fairway.

"Playing alone?"

He looked around. A stout man of fifty, with a huge face, high forehead, long wide upper lip and great undershot jaw, was taking a driver from a bulging bag. "Why—yes."

"Mind if I go round with you?"

"Not at all."

Juan greeted the suggestion with a certain gloomy relief. They were evenly matched, the older man's steady short shots keeping pace with Juan's occasional brilliancy. Not until the seventh hole did the conversation rise above the fragmentary boasting and formalized praise which forms the small talk of golf.

"Haven't seen you around before."

"I'm just visiting here," Juan explained, "staying with my cousin, Miss Chandler."

"Oh yes—know Miss Chandler very well. Nice old snob."

"What?" inquired Juan.

"Nice old snob, I said. No offence...Your honour, I think." Not for several holes did Juan venture to comment on his partner's remark.

"What do you mean when you say she's a nice old snob?" he inquired with interest.

"Oh, it's an old quarrel between Miss Chandler and me," answered the older man brusquely.

"She's an old friend of my wife's. When we were married and came out to Culpepper Bay for the summer, she tried to freeze us out. Said my wife had no business marrying me. I was an outsider."

"What did you do?"

"We just let her alone. She came round, but naturally I never had much love for her. She even tried to put her oar in before we were married." He laughed. "Cora Chandler of Boston—how she used to boss the girls around in those days! At twenty-five she had the sharpest tongue in Back Bay. They were old people there, you know—Emerson and Whittier to dinner and all that. My wife belonged to that crowd too. I was from the Middle West...Oh, too bad. I should have stopped talking. That makes me two up again."

Suddenly Juan wanted to present his case to this man—not quite as it was, but adorned with a dignity and significance it did not so far possess. It began to round out in his mind as the sempiternal struggle of the poor young man against a snobbish, purse-proud world. This new aspect was comforting, and he put out of his mind the less pleasant realization that, superficially at least, money hadn't entered into it. He knew in his heart that it was his unfortunate egotism that had repelled Noel, his embarrassment, his absurd attempt to make her jealous with Holly. Only indirectly was his poverty concerned; under different circumstances it might have given a touch of romance.

"I know exactly how you must have felt," he broke out suddenly as they walked toward the tenth tee. "I haven't any money and I'm in love with a girl who has—and it seems as if every busybody in the world is determined to keep us apart."

For a moment Juan believed this. His companion looked at him sharply

"Does the girl care about you?" he inquired.

"Yes."

"Well, go after her, young man. All the money in this world hasn't been made by a long shot."

"I'm still in college," said Juan, suddenly taken aback.

"Won't she wait for you?"

"I don't know. You see, the pressure's pretty strong. Her family want her to many a rich man—" His mind visualized the tall well-dressed stranger of this morning and invention soared. "An easterner that's visiting here, and I'm afraid they'll all sweep her off her feet. If it's not this man, it's the next."

His friend considered.

"You can't have everything, you know," he said presently. "I'm the last man to advise a young man to leave college, especially when I don't know anything about him or his abilities; but if it's going to break you up not to get her, you better think about getting to work."

"I've been considering that," said Juan frowning. The idea was ten seconds old in his mind.

"All girls are crazy now, anyhow," broke out the older man. "They begin to think of men at fifteen, and by the time they're seventeen they run off with the chauffeur next door."

"That's true," agreed Juan absently. He was absorbed in the previous suggestion. "The trouble is that I don't live in Boston. If I left college I'd want to be near her, because it might be a few months before I'd be able to support her. And I don't know how I'd go about getting a position in Boston."

"If you're Cora Chandler's cousin, that oughtn't to be difficult. She knows everybody in town. And the girl's family will probably help you out, once you've got her—some of them are fools enough for anything in these crazy days."

"I wouldn't like that."

"Rich girls can't live on air," said the older man grimly.

They played for a while in silence. Suddenly, as they approached a green, Juan's companion turned to him frowning.

"Look here, young man," he said, "I don't know whether you are really thinking of leaving college or whether I've just put the idea in your head. If I have, forget it. Go home and talk it over with your family. Do what they tell you to."

"My father's dead."

"Well, then ask your mother. She's got your best interest at heart."

His attitude had noticeably stiffened, as if he were sorry he had become even faintly involved in Juan's problem. He guessed that there was something solid in the boy, but he suspected his readiness to confide in strangers and his helplessness about getting a job. Something was lacking—not confidence, exactly. "It might be a few months before I was able to support her"—but something stronger, fiercer, more external. When they walked together into the caddie house he shook hands with him and was about to turn away, when impulse impelled him to add one word more.

"If you decide to try Boston come and see me," he said. He pressed a card into Juan's hand.

"Good-bye. Good luck. Remember, a woman's like a street car—"

He walked into the locker room. After paying his caddie, Juan glanced down at the card which he still held in his hand.

"Harold Garneau," it read, "23-7 State Street."

A moment later Juan was walking nervously and hurriedly from the grounds of the Culpepper Club, casting no glance behind.

V

One month later San Juan Chandler arrived in Boston and took an inexpensive room in a small downtown hotel. In his pocket was two hundred dollars in cash and an envelope full of liberty bonds aggregating fifteen hundred dollars more—the whole being a fund which had been started by his father when he was born, to give him his chance in life. Not without argument had he come into possession of this—not without tears had his decision to abandon his last year at college been approved by his mother. He had not told her everything; simply that he had an advantageous offer of a position in Boston; the rest she guessed and was tactfully silent. As a matter of fact, he had neither a position nor a plan, but he was twenty-one now, with the blemishes of youth departed for ever. One thing Juan knew—he was going to marry Noel Garneau. The sting and hurt and shame of that Sunday morning ran through his dreams, stronger than any doubts he might have felt, stronger even than the romantic boyish love for her that had blossomed one dry, still Montana night. That was still there, but locked apart; what had happened later overlay it, muffled it. It was necessary now to his pride, his self-respect, his very existence, that he have her, in order to wipe out his memory of the day on which he had grown three years.

He hadn't seen her since. The following morning he had left Culpepper Bay and gone home.

Yes, he had a wonderful time. Yes, Cousin Cora had been very nice. Nor had he written, though a week later a surprised but somehow flippant and terrible note had come from her, saying how pleasant it was to have seen him again and how bad it was to leave without saying good-bye.

"Holly Morgan sends her best," it concluded, with kind, simulated reproach. "Perhaps she ought to be writing instead of me. I always thought you were fickle, and now I know it."

The poor effort which she had made to hide her indifference made him shiver. He did not add the letter to a certain cherished package tied with blue ribbon, but burned it up in an ash tray—a tragic gesture which almost set his mother's house on fire.

So he began his life in Boston, and the story of his first year there is a fairy tale too immoral to be told. It is the story of one of those mad, illogical successes upon whose substantial foundations ninety-nine failures are later reared. Though he worked hard, he deserved no special credit for it—no credit, that is, commensurate with the reward he received. He ran into a man who had a scheme, a preposterous scheme, for the cold storage of sea food which he had been trying to finance for several years. Juan's inexperience allowed him to be responsive and he invested twelve hundred dollars. In his first year this appalling indiscretion paid him 400 per cent. His partner attempted to buy him out, but they reached a compromise and Juan kept his shares.

The inner sense of his own destiny which had never deserted him whispered that he was going to be a rich man. But at the end of that year an event took place which made him think that it didn't matter after all.

He had seen Noel Garneau twice—once entering a theatre and once riding through a Boston street in the back of her limousine, looking, he thought afterwards, bored and pale and tired. At the time he had thought nothing; an overwhelming emotion had seized his heart, held it helpless, suspended, as though it were in the grasp of material fingers. He had shrunk back hastily under the awning of a shop and waited trembling, horrified, ecstatic, until she went by. She did not know he was in Boston—he did not want her to know until he was ready. He followed her every move in the society columns of the papers. She was at school, at home for Christmas, at Hot Springs for Easter, coming out in the fall. Then she was a debutante, and every day he read of her at dinners and dances and assemblies and balls and charity functions and theatricals of the Junior League. A dozen blurred newspaper unlikenesses of her filled a drawer of his desk. And still he waited. Let Noel have her fling.

When he had been sixteen months in Boston, and when Noel's first season was dying away in the hum of the massed departure for Florida, Juan decided to wait no longer. So on a raw, damp February day, when children in rubber boots were building darns in the snow-filled gutters, a blond, handsome, well-dressed young man walked up the steps of the Garneau's Boston house and handed his card to the maid. With his heart beating loud, he went into a drawing-room and sat down.

A sound of a dress on the stairs, light feet in the hall, an exclamation—Noel!

"Why, Juan," she exclaimed, surprised, pleased, polite, "I didn't know you were in Boston. It's so good to see you. I thought you'd thrown me over for ever."

In a moment he found voice—it was easier now than it had been. Whether or not she was aware of the change, he was a nobody no longer. There was something solid behind him that would prevent him ever again from behaving like a self-centred child.

He explained that he might settle in Boston, and allowed her to guess that he had done extremely well; and, though it cost him a twinge of pain, he spoke humourously of their last meeting, implying that he had left the swimming party on an impulse of anger at her. He could not confess that the impulse had been one of shame. She laughed. Suddenly he grew curiously happy.

Half an hour passed. The fire glowed in the hearth. The day darkened outside and the room moved into that shadowy twilight, that weather of indoors, which is like a breathless starshine. He had been standing; now he sat down beside her on the couch.

"Noel—"

Footsteps sounded lightly through the hall as the maid went through to the front door. Noel reached up quickly and turned up the electric lamp on the table behind her head.

"I didn't realize how dark it was growing," she said rather quickly, he thought. Then the maid stood in the doorway.

"Mr Templeton," she announced.

"Oh, yes," agreed Noel.

Mr Templeton, with a Harvard-Oxford drawl, mature, very much at home, looked at him with just a flicker of surprise, nodded, mumbled a bare politeness and took an easy position in front of the fire. He exchanged several remarks with Noel which indicated a certain familiarity with her movements.

Then a short silence fell. Juan rose.

"I want to see you soon," he said. "I'll phone, shall I, and you tell me when I can call?"

She walked with him to the door.

"So good to talk to you again," she told him cordially. "Remember, I want to see a lot of you, Juan."

When he left he was happier than he had been for two years. He ate dinner alone at a restaurant, almost singing to himself; and then, wild with elation, walked along the waterfront till midnight. He awoke thinking of her, wanting to tell people that what had been lost was found again. There had been more between them than the mere words said—Noel's sitting with him in the half-darkness, her slight but perceptible nervousness as she came with him to the door.

Two days later he opened the Transcript to the society page and read down to the third item. There his eyes stopped, became like china eyes:

Mr and Mrs Harold Garneau announce the engagement of their daughter Noel to Mr Brooks Fish Templeton. Mr Templeton graduated from Harvard in the class of 1912 and is a partner in—

VI

At three o'clock that afternoon Juan rang the Garneaus' doorbell and was shown into the hall. From somewhere upstairs he heard girls' voices, and another murmur came from the drawing-room on the right, where he had talked to Noel only the week before.

"Can you show me into some room that isn't being used?" he demanded tensely of the maid. "I'm an old friend—it's very important—I've got to see Miss Noel alone."

He waited in a small den at the back of the hall. Ten minutes passed—ten minutes more; he began to be afraid she wasn't coming. At the end of half an hour the door bounced open and Noel came hurriedly in.

"Juan!" she cried happily. "This is wonderful! I might have known you'd be the first to come." Her expression changed as she saw his face, and she hesitated. "But why were you shown in here?" she went on quickly. "You must come and meet everyone. I'm rushing around today like a chicken without a head."

"Noel!" he said thickly.

"What?"

Her hand was on the door knob. She turned, startled.

"Noel, I haven't come to congratulate you," Juan said, his face white and his voice harsh with his effort at self-control. "I've come to tell you you're making an awful mistake."

"Why—Juan!"

"And you know it," he went on. "You know no one loves you as I love you, Noel. I want you to marry me." She laughed nervously.

"Why, Juan, that's silly! I don't understand your talking like this. I'm engaged to another man."

"Noel, will you come here and sit down?"

"I can't, Juan—there're a dozen people outside. I've got to see them. It wouldn't be polite. Another time, Juan. If you come another time I'd love to talk to you."

"Now!" The word was stark, unyielding, almost savage. She hesitated.

"Ten minutes," he said.

"I've really got to go, Juan."

She sat down uncertainly, glancing at the door. Sitting beside her, Juan told her simply and directly everything that had happened to him since they had met, a year and a half before. He told her of his family, his Cousin Cora, of his inner humiliation at Culpepper Bay. Then he told her of his coming to Boston and of his success, and how at last, having something to bring her, he had come only to find he was too late. He kept back nothing. In his voice, as in his mind, there was no pretence now, no selfconsciousness, but only a sincere and overmastering emotion. He had no defence for what he was doing, he said, save this—that he had somehow gained the right to present his case, to have her know how much his devotion had inspired him, to have her look once, if only in passing, upon the fact that for two years he had loved her faithfully and well.

When Juan finished, Noel was crying. It was terrible, she said, to tell her all this—just when she had decided about her life. It hadn't been easy, yet it was done now, and she was really going to marry this other man. But she had never heard anything like this before—it upset her. She was—oh, so terribly sorry, but there was no use. If he had cared so much he might have let her know before. But how could he let her know? He had had nothing to offer her except the fact that one summer night out West they had been overwhelmingly drawn together.

"And you love me now," he said in a low voice. "You wouldn't cry, Noel, if you didn't love me. You wouldn't care."

"I'm—I'm sorry for you."

"It's more than that. You loved me the other day. You wanted me to sit beside you in the dark. Didn't I feel it—didn't I know? There's something between us, Noel—a sort of pull. Something you always do to me and I to you—except that one sad time. Oh, Noel, don't you know how it breaks my heart to see you sitting there two feet away from me, to want to put my arms around you and know you've made a senseless promise to another man?" There was a knock outside the door.

"Noel!"

She raised her head, putting a handkerchief quickly to her eyes.

"Yes?"

"It's Brooks. May I come in?" Without waiting for an answer, Templeton opened the door and stood looking at them curiously. "Excuse me," he said. He nodded brusquely at Juan. "Noel, there are lots of people here—"

"In a minute," she said lifelessly.

"Aren't you well?"

"Yes."

He came into the room, frowning.

"What's been upsetting you, dear?" He glanced quickly at Juan, who stood up, his eyes blurred with tears. A menacing note crept into Templeton's voice. "I hope no one's been upsetting you."

For answer, Noel flopped down over a hill of pillows and sobbed aloud. "Noel—" Templeton sat beside her, and put his arm on her shoulder—"Noel." He turned again to Juan, "I think it would be best if you left us alone, Mr—" the name escaped his memory. "Noel's a little tired."

"I won't go," said Juan.

"Please wait outside then. We'll see you later."

"I won't wait outside. I want to speak to Noel. It was you who interrupted."

"And I have a perfect right to interrupt." His face reddened angrily. "Just who the devil are you, anyhow?"

"My name is Chandler."

"Well, Mr Chandler, you're in the way here—is that plain? Your presence here is an intrusion and a presumption."

"We look at it in different ways."

They glared at each other angrily. After a moment Templeton raised Noel to a sitting posture.

"I'm going to take you upstairs, dear," he said. "This has been a strain today. If you lie down till dinnertime—"

He helped her to her feet. Not looking at Juan, and still dabbing her face with her handkerchief, Noel suffered herself to be persuaded into the hall. Templeton turned in the doorway.

"The maid will give you your hat and coat, Mr Chandler."

"I'll wait right here," said Juan.

VII

He was still there at half past six, when, following a quick knock, a large broad bulk which Juan recognized as Mr Harold Garneau came into the room.

"Good evening, sir," said Mr Garneau, annoyed and peremptory. "Just what can I do for you?" He came closer and a flicker of recognition passed over his face.

"Oh!" he muttered.

"Good evening, sir," said Juan.

"It's you, is it?" Mr Garneau appeared to hesitate. "Brooks Templeton said that you were—that you insisted on seeing Noel—" he coughed—"that you refused to go home."

"I want to see Noel, if you don't mind."

"What for?"

"That's between Noel and me, Mr Garneau."

"Mr Templeton and I are quite entitled to represent Noel in this case," said Mr Garneau patiently.

"She has just made the statement before her mother and me that she doesn't want to see you again. Isn't that plain enough?"

"I don't believe it," said Juan stubbornly. "I'm not in the habit of lying."

"I beg your pardon. I meant—"

"I don't want to discuss this unfortunate business with you," broke out Garneau contemptuously. "I just want you to leave right now—and come back."

"Why do you call it an unfortunate business?" inquired Juan coolly. "Good night, Mr Chandler."

"You call it an unfortunate business because Noel's broken her engagement."

"You are presumptuous, sir!" cried the older man. "Unbearably sumptuous."

"Mr Garneau, you yourself were once kind enough to tell me—"

"I don't give a damn what I told you!" cried Garneau. "You get out of here now!" "Very well, I have no choice. I wish you to be good enough to tell Noel that I'll be back tomorrow afternoon." Juan nodded, went into the hall and took his hat and coat from a chair. Upstairs, he heard running footsteps and a door opened and closed—not before he had caught the sound of impassioned voices and a short broken sob. He hesitated. Then he continued on along the hall towards the front door. Through a portiere of the dining-room he caught sight of a man-servant laying the service for dinner.

He rang the bell the next afternoon at the same hour. This time the butler, evidently instructed, answered the door.

Miss Noel was not at home. Could he leave a note? It was no use; Miss Noel was not in the city. Incredulous but anxious, Juan took a taxicab to Harold Garneau's office. "Mr Garneau can't see you. If you like, he will speak to you for a moment on the phone."

Juan nodded. The clerk touched a button on the waiting-room switchboard and handed an instrument to Juan.

"This is San Juan Chandler speaking. They told me at your residence that Noel had gone away. Is that true?"

"Yes." The monosyllable was short and cold. "She's gone away for a rest. Won't be back for several months. Anything else?" "Did she leave any word for me?"

"No! She hates the sight of you."

"What's her address?"

"That doesn't happen to be your affair. Good morning."

Juan went back to his apartment and mused over the situation. Noel had been spirited out of town—that was the only expression he knew for it. And undoubtedly her engagement to Templeton was at least temporarily broken. He had toppled it over within an hour. He must see her again—that was the immediate necessity. But where? She was certainly with friends, and probably with relatives. That latter was the first clue to follow—he must find out the names of the relatives she had most frequently visited before.

He phoned Holly Morgan. She was in the south and not expected back Boston till May. Then he called the society editor of the Boston Transcript. After a short wait, a polite, attentive, feminine voice conversed with him on the wire.

"This is Mr San Juan Chandler," he said, trying to intimate by his voice that he was a distinguished leader of cotillions in the Back Bay. "I want to get some information, if you please, about the family of Mr Harold Garneau."

"Why don't you apply directly to Mr Garneau?" advised the society editor, not without suspicion.

"I'm not on speaking terms with Mr Garneau."

A pause; then—"Well, really, we can't be responsible for giving out information in such a peculiar way."

"But there can't be any secret about who Mr and Mrs Garneau's relations are!" protested Juan in exasperation.

"But how can we be sure that you—"

He hung up the receiver. Two other papers gave no better results, a third was willing, but ignorant. It seemed absurd, almost like a conspiracy, that in a city where the Garneaus were so well known he could not obtain the desired names. It was as if everything had tightened up against his arrival on the scene. After a day of fruitless and embarrassing inquiries in stores, where his questions were looked upon with the suspicion that he might be compiling a sucker list, and of poring through back numbers of the Social Register, he saw that there was but one resource—that was Cousin Cora. Next morning he took the three-hour ride to Culpepper Bay.

It was the first time he had seen her for a year and a half, since the disastrous termination of his summer visit. She was offended—that he knew—especially since she had heard from his mother of the unexpected success. She greeted him coldly and reproachfully; but she told him what he wanted to know, because Juan asked his questions while she was still startled and surprised by his visit. He left Culpepper Bay with the information that Mrs Garneau had one sister, the famous Mrs Morton Poindexter, with whom Noel was on terms of great intimacy. Juan took the midnight train for New York.

Morton Poindexters' telephone number was not in the New York book, and Information refused to divulge it; but Juan procured it reference to the Social Register. He called the house from his "Miss Noel Garneau—is she in the city?" he inquired, according to hi plan. If the name was not immediately familiar, the servant would rent that he had the wrong number.

"Who wants to speak to her, please?"

That was a relief; his heart sank comfortably back into place.

"Oh—a friend."

"No name?"

"No name."

"I'll see."

The servant returned in a moment.

No, Miss Garneau was not there, was not in the city, was not expected.

The phone clicked off suddenly.

Late that afternoon a taxi dropped him in front of the Morton Poindexters' house. It was the most elaborate house that he had ever seen, rising to five storeys on a corner of Fifth Avenue and adorned even with that ghost of a garden which, however minute, is the proudest gesture of money in New York.

He handed no card to the butler, but it occurred to him that he must be expected, for he was shown immediately into the drawing-room. When, after a short wait, Mrs Poindexter entered he experienced for the first time in five days a touch of uncertainty.

Mrs Poindexter was perhaps thirty-five, and of that immaculate fashion which the French describe as bien soignee. The inexpressible loveliness of her face was salted with another quality which for want of a better word might be called dignity. But it was more than dignity, for it wore no rigidity, but instead a softness so adaptable, so elastic, that it would withdraw from any attack which life might bring against it, only to spring back at the proper moment, taut, victorious and complete. San Juan saw that even though his guess was correct as to Noel's being in the house, he was up against a force with which he had no contact before. This woman seemed to be not entirely of America, to possess resources which the American woman lacked or handled ineptly.

She received him with a graciousness which, though it was largely external, seemed to conceal no perturbation underneath. Indeed, her attitude appeared to be perfectly passive, just short of encouraging. It was with an effort that he resisted the inclination to lay his cards on the table. "Good evening." She sat down on a stiff chair in the centre of the room and asked him to take an easy-chair near by. She sat looking at him silently until he spoke.

"Mrs Poindexter, I am very anxious to see Miss Garneau. I telephoned your house this morning and was told that she was not here." Mrs Poindexter nodded. "However, I know she is here," he continued evenly. "And I'm determined to see her. The idea that her father and mother can prevent me from seeing her, as though I had disgraced myself in some way—or that you, Mrs Poindexter, can prevent me from seeing her—" His voice rose a little. "—is preposterous. This is not the year 1500—nor even the year 1910."

He paused. Mrs Poindexter waited for a moment to see if he had finished. Then she said, quietly and unequivocally, "I quite agree with you."

Save for Noel, Juan thought he had never seen anyone so beautiful before.

"Mrs Poindexter," he began again, in a more friendly tone, "I'm sorry to seem rude. I've been called presumptuous in this matter, and perhaps to some extent I am. Perhaps all poor boys who are in love with wealthy girls are presumptuous. But it happens that I am no longer a poor boy, and I have good reason to believe that Noel cares for me."

"I see," said Mrs Poindexter attentively. "But of course I knew nothing about all that."

Juan hesitated, again disarmed by her complaisance. Then a surge of determination went over him.

"Will you let me see her?" he demanded. "Or will you insist on keeping up this farce a little longer?"

Mrs Poindexter looked at him as though considering.

"Why should I let you see her?"

"Simply because I ask you. Just as, when someone says 'Excuse me' you step aside for him in a doorway."

Mrs Poindexter frowned.

"But Noel is concerned in this matter as much as you. And I'm not like person in a crowd. I'm more like a bodyguard, with instructions to let no one pass, even if they say 'Excuse me' in a most appealing voice."

"You have instructions only from her father and mother," said Juan, with rising impatience. "She's the person concerned."

"I'm glad you begin to admit that."

"Of course I admit it," he broke out. "I want you to admit it."

"I do."

"Then what's the point of all this absurd discussion?" he demanded heatedly.

She stood up suddenly. "I bid you good evening, sir."

Taken aback, Juan stood up too. "Why, what's the matter?"

"I will not be spoken to like that," said Mrs Poindexter, still in a low cool voice. "Either you can conduct yourself quietly or you can leave this house at once."

Juan realized that he had taken the wrong tone. The words stung at him and for a moment he had nothing to say—as though he were a scolded boy at school. "This is beside the question," he stammered finally. "I want to talk to Noel."

"Noel doesn't want to talk to you." Suddenly Mrs Poindexter held out a sheet of note paper to him. He opened it. It said:

Aunt Jo: As to what we talked about this afternoon: If that intolerable bore calls, as he will probably do, and begins his presumptuous whining, please speak to him frankly. Tell him I never loved him, that I never at any time claimed to love him and that his persistence is revolting to me. Say that I am old enough to know my own mind and that my greatest wish is never to see him again in this world.

Juan stood there aghast. His universe was suddenly about him. Noel did not care, she had never cared. It was all a preposterous joke on him, played by those to whom the business of life had been such jokes from the beginning. He realized now that fundamentally they were all akin—Cousin Cora, Noel, her father, this cold, lovely woman here—affirming the prerogative of the rich to marry always within their caste, to erect artificial barriers and standards against those who could presume upon a summer's philandering. The scales fell from his eyes and he saw his year and a half of struggle and effort not as progress towards a goal but only as a little race he had run by himself, outside, with no one to beat except himself—no one who cared.

Blindly he looked about for his hat, scarcely realizing it was in the hall. Blindly he stepped back when Mrs Poindexter's hand moved towards him half a foot through the mist and Mrs Poindexter's voice said softly, "I'm sorry." Then he was in the hall, the note still clutched in the hand that struggled through the sleeve of his overcoat, the words which he felt he must somehow say choking through his lips.

"I didn't understand. I regret very much that I've bothered you. It wasn't dear to me how matters stood—between Noel and me—"

His hand was on the door knob.

"I'm sorry, too," said Mrs Poindexter. "I didn't realize from what Noel said that what I had to do would be so hard—Mr Templeton."

"Chandler," he corrected her dully. "My name's Chandler."

She stood dead still; suddenly her face went white.

"What?"

"My name—it's Chandler."

Like a flash she threw herself against the half-open door and it bumped shut. Then in a flash she was at the foot of the staircase.

"Noel!" she cried in a high, clear call. "Noel! Noel! Come down, Noel!" Her lovely voice floated up like a bell through the long high central hall. "Noel! Come down! It's Mr Chandler! It's Chandler!"


THE END

 


About the Author 

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald (1896 - 1940), better known as F. Scott Fitzgerald, was an American author of novels and short stories, born in St. Paul, Minnesota, and raised in an Irish middle class family. He is best known for his masterpiece, The Great Gatsby and Tender Is the Night.

The author was named after his famous second cousin, Francis Scott Key, who penned The Star Spangled Banner.

Fitzgerald's prolific short stories tend to center around the promise of youth, followed by the effects of age and despair. Fitzgerald was considered one of the best authors of the twentieth century, a leading voice for the "Lost Generation" of the 1920s and the Jazz Age.

F. Scott Fitzgerald spent a great deal of his youth in Buffalo, New York, then moved to New Jersey to attend Princeton University. Fitzgerald dropped out and enlisted in the U.S. Army in 1917 on the brink of World War I, but did not see combat. He became an officer, married, and after being decommissioned, went to New York City to pursue his literary career. This Side of Paradise was his first successful novel, allowing him to travel extensively in Paris and the French Riviera in the 1920s, creating the backdrop for his most widely-acclaimed work, The Great Gatsby which was published in 1925. He befriended great authors such as Ernest Hemingway during this period. Fitzgerald contributed stories to The Saturday Evening Post for most of his career. The first story in which his name appeared on the cover was Bernice Bobs Her Hair (1920).

Fitzgerald was in poor health after spending most of his adulthood abusing alcohol and suffered three heart attacks. He died at the age of 44 in 1941.

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