All the Sad Young Men

All the Sad Young Men Page 15

by F. Scott Fitzgerald

  “I see new lines in my face here,” she said, raising her finger and placing it between her eyes, “and a few shadows at the sides that might be—that are little wrinkles.”

  “Do you care?”

  She turned quickly. “No,” she said.

  “Do you realize that Chuck is gone? That you’ll never see him any more?”

  “Yes.” She passed her hands slowly over her eyes. “But that all seems so vague and far away.”

  “Vague and far away,” he repeated; and then: “And are you afraid of me now?”

  “Not any longer,” she said, and she added frankly, “now that you’re going away.”

  He moved toward the door. He seemed particularly weary to-night, as though he could hardly move about at all.

  “The household here is in your keeping,” he said in a tired whisper. “If there is any light and warmth in it, it will be your light and warmth; if it is happy, it will be because you’ve made it so. Happy things may come to you in life, but you must never go seeking them any more. It is your turn to make the fire.”

  “Won’t you sit down a moment longer?” Luella ventured.

  “There isn’t time.” His voice was so low now that she could scarcely hear the words. “But remember that whatever suffering comes to you, I can always help you—if it is something that can be helped. I promise nothing.”

  He opened the door. She must find out now what she most wanted to know, before it was too late.

  “What have you done to me?” she cried. “Why have I no sorrow left for Chuck—for anything at all? Tell me, I almost see, yet I can’t see. Before you go—tell me who you are!”

  “Who am I?—”

  His worn suit paused in the doorway. His round, pale face seemed to dissolve into two faces, a dozen faces, a score, each one different yet the same—sad, happy, tragic, indifferent, resigned—until threescore Doctor Moons were ranged like an infinite series of reflections, like months stretching into the vista of the past.

  “Who am I?” he repeated; “I am five years.”

  The door closed.

  At six o’clock Charles Hemple came home, and as usual Luella met him in the hall. Except that now his hair was dead white, his long illness of two years had left no mark upon him. Luella herself was more noticeably changed—she was a little stouter, and there were those lines around her eyes that had come when Chuck died one evening back in 1921. But she was still lovely, and there was a mature kindness about her face at twenty-eight, as if suffering had touched her only reluctantly and then hurried away.

  “Ede and her husband are coming to dinner,” she said. “I’ve got theatre tickets, but if you’re tired, I don’t care whether we go or not.” “I’d like to go.”

  She looked at him. “You wouldn’t.” “I really would.”

  “We’ll see how you feel after dinner.”

  He put his arm around her waist. Together they walked into the nursery where the two children were waiting up to say good night.

  THE END

  ==========

  Hot And Cold Blood by F. Scott Fitzgerald

  One day when the young Mathers had been married for about a year, Jaqueline walked inti the rooms of the hardware brekerage which her husband carried on with more than average success. At the open door of the inner office she stopped and said: “Oh, excuse me -” She had interrupted an apparently trivial yet somehow intriguing scene. A young man named Bronson whom she knew slightly was standing with her husband; the latter had risen from his desk. Bronson seized her husband’s hand and shook it earnestly—something more than earnestly. When they heard Jaqueline’s step in the doorway both men turned and Jaqueline saw that Bronson’s eyes were red.

  A moment later he came out, passing her with a somewhat embarrassed “How do you do?” She walked into her husband’s office.

  “What was Ed Bronson doing here?” she demanded curiously, and at once.

  Jim Mather smiled at her, half shutting his gray eyes, and drew her quietly to a sitting position on his desk.

  “He just dropped in for a minute,” he answered easily. “How’s everything at home?”

  “All right.” She looked at him with curiosity. “What did he want?” she insisted.

  “Oh, he just wanted to see me about something.”

  “What?”

  “Oh, just something. Business.”

  “Why were his eyes red?”

  “Were they?” He looked at her innocently, and then suddenly they both began to laugh. Jaqueline rose and walked around the desk and plumped down into his swivel chair.

  “You might as well tell me,” she announced cheerfully, “because I’m going to stay right here till you do.”

  “Well -” he hesitated, frowning. “He wanted me to do him a little favor.”

  Then Jaqueline understood, or rather her mind leaped half accidentally to the truth.

  “Oh.” Her voice tightened a little. “You’ve been lending him some money.”

  “Only a little.”

  “How much?”

  “Only three hundred.” “Only three hundred.” The voice was of the texture of Bessemer cooled. “How much do we spend a month, Jim?”

  “Why—why, about five or six hundred, I guess.” He shifted uneasily.

  “Listen, Jack. Bronson’ll pay that back. He’s in a little trouble. He’s made a mistake about a girl out in Woodmere -”

  “And he knows you’re famous for being an easy mark, so he comes to you,” interrupted Jaqueline.

  “No.” He denied this formally.

  “Don’t you suppose I could use that three hundred dollars?” she demanded. “How about that trip to New York we couldn’t afford last November?”

  The lingering smile faded from Mather’s face. He went over and shut the door to the outer office.

  “Listen, Jack,” he began, “you don’t understand this. Bronson’s one of the men I eat lunch with almost every day. We used to play together when we were kids, we went to school together. Don’t you see that I’m just the person he’d be right to come to in trouble? And that’s just why I couldn’t refuse.”

  Jaqueline gave her shoulders a twist as if to shake off this reasoning.

  “Well,” she answered decidedly, “all I know is that he’s no good. He’s always lit and if he doesn’t choose to work he has no business living off the work you do.”

  They were sitting now on either side of the desk, each having adopted the attitude of one talking to a child. They began their sentences with “Listen!” and their faces wore expressions of rather tried patience.

  “If you can’t understand, I can’t tell you,” Mather concluded, at the end of fifteen minutes, on what was, for him, an irritated key. “Such obligations do happen to exist sometimes among men and they have to be met. It’s more complicated than just refusing to lend money, especially in a business like mine where so much depends on the good-will of men down-town.”

  Mather was putting on his coat as he said this. He was going home with her on the street-car to lunch. They were between automobiles—they had sold their old one and were going to get a new one in the spring. Now the street-car, on this particular day, was distinctly unfortunate. The argument in the office might have been forgotten under other circumstances, but what followed irritated the scratch until it became a serious temperamental infection.

  They found a seat near the front of the car. It was late February an eager, unpunctilious sun was turning the scrawny street snow into dirty, cheerful rivulets that echoed in the gutters. Because of this the car was less full than usual—there was no one standing. The motorman had even opened his window and a yellow breeze was blowing the late breath of winter from the car.

  It occurred pleasurably to Jaqueline that her husband sitting beside her was handsome and kind above other men. It was silly to try to change him. Perhaps Bronson might return the money after all, and anyhow three hundred dollars wasn’t a fortune. Of course he had no business doing it—but then -

  Her musings were interrupted as an eddy of passengers pushed up the aisle, Jaqueline wished they’d put their hands over their mouths when they coughed, and she hoped
that Jim would get a new machine pretty soon. You couldn’t tell what disease you’d run into in these trolleys.

  She turned to Jim to discuss the subject—but Jim had stood up and was offering his seat to a woman who had been standing beside him in the aisle. The woman, without so much as a grunt, sat down. Jaqueline frowned.

  The woman was. about fifty and enormous. When she first sat down she was content merely to fill the unoccupied part of the seat, but after a moment she began to expand and to spread her great rolls of fat over a larger and larger area until the process took on the aspect of violent trespassing. When the car rocked in Jaqueline’s direction the woman slid with it, but when it rocked back she managed by some exercise of ingenuity to dig in and hold the ground won.

  Jaqueline caught her husband’s eye—he was swaying on a strap—and in an angry glance conveyed to him her entire disapproval of his action. He apologized mutely and became urgently engrossed in a row of car cards. The fat woman moved once more against Jaqueline—she was now practically overlapping her. Then she turned puffy, disagreeable eyes full on Mrs. James Mather, and coughed rousingly in her face.

  With a smothered exclamation Jaqueline got to her feet, squeezed with brisk violence past the fleshy knees, and made her way, pink with rage, toward the rear of the car. There she seized a strap, and_ there she was presently joined by her husband in a state of considerable alarm.

  They exchanged no word, but stood silently side by side for ten minutes while a row of men sitting in front of them crackled their newspapers and kept their eyes fixed virtuously upon the day’s cartoons.

  When they left the car at last Jaqueline exploded.

  “You big fool!” she cried wildly. “Did you see that horrible woman you gave your seat to? Why don’t you consider me occasionally instead of every fat selfish washwoman you meet?”

  “How should I know -”

  But Jaqueline was as angy at him as she had ever been—it was unusual for anyone to get angry at him.

  “You didn’t see any of those men getting up for me, did you? No—wonder you were too tired to go out last Monday night. You’d probably given your seat to some—to some horrible, Polish washwoman that’s strong as an ox and likes to stand up!”

  They were walking along the slushy street stepping wildly into great pools of water. Confused and distressed, Mather could utter neither apology nor defense.

  Jaqueline broke off and then turned to him with a curious light in her eyes. The words in which she couched her summary of the situation were probably the most disagreeable that had ever been addressed to him in his life.

  “The trouble with you, Jim, the reason you’re such an easy mark, is that you’ve got the ideas of a college freshman—you’re a professional nice fellow.”

  II

  The incident and the unpleasantness were forgotten. Mather’s vast good nature had smoothed over the roughness within an hour. References to it fell with a dying cadence throughout several days—then ceased and tumbled into the limbo of oblivion. I say “limbo,” for oblivion is, unfortunately, never quite oblivious. The subject was drowned out by the fact that Jaqueline with her customary spirit and coolness began the long, arduous, up-hill business of bearing a child. Her natural traits and prejudices became intensified and she was less inclined to let things pass. It was April now, and as yet they had not bought a car. Mather had discovered that he was saving practically nothing and that in another half-year he would have a family on his hands. It worried him. A wrinkle—small, tentative, undisturbing—appeared for the first time as a shadow around his honest, friendly eyes. He worked far into the spring twilight now, and frequently brought home with him the overflow from his office day. The new car would have to be postponed for a while.

  April afternoon, and all the city shopping on Washington Street. Jaqueline walked slowly past the shops, brooding without fear or depression on the shape into which her life was now being arbitrarily forced. Dry summer dust was in the wind; the sun bounded cheerily from the plate-glass windows and made radiant gasoline rainbows where automobile drippings had formed pools on the street.

  Jaqueline stopped. Not six feet from her a bright new sport roadster was parked at the curb. Beside it stood two men in conversation, and at the moment when she identified one of them as young Bronson she heard him say to the other in a casual tone: “What do you think of it? Just got it this morning.” -Jaqueline turned abruptly and walked with quick tapping steps to her husband’s office. With her usual curt nod to the stenographer she strode by her to the inner room. Mather looked up from his desk in surprise at her brusque entry.

  “Jim,” she began breathlessly, “did Bronson ever pay you that three hundred?”

  “Why—no” he answered hesitantly, “not yet. He was in here last week and he explained that he was a little bit hard up.” Her eyes gleamed with angry triumph.

  “Oh, he did?” she snapped. “Well, he’s just bought a new sport roadster that must have cost anyhow twenty-five hundred dollars.” He shook his head, unbelieving.

  “I saw it,” she insisted. “I heard him say he’d just bought it.” “He told me he was hard up,” repeated Mather helplessly. Jaqueline audibly gave up by heaving a profound noise, a sort of groanish sigh.

  “He was using you! He knew you were easy and he was using you. Can’t you see? He wanted you to buy him the car and you did!” She laughed bitterly. “He’s probably roaring his sides out to think how easily he worked you.”

  “Oh, no,” protested Mather with a shocked expression, you must have mistaken somebody for him -

  “We walk—and he rides on our money,” she interrupted excitedly.

  “Oh, it’s rich—it’s rich. If it wasn’t so maddening, it’d be absurd. Look here—!” Her voice grew sharper, more restrained—there was a touch of contempt in it now. “You spend half your time doing things for people who don’t give a damn about you or what becomes of you. You give up your seat on the street-car to hogs, and come home too dead tired to even move. You’re on all sorts of committees that take at least an hour a day out of your business and you don’t get a cent out of them. You’re—eternally—being used!—I won’t stand it! I thought I married a man—not a professional Samaritan who’s going to fetch and carry for the world!”

  As she finished her invective Jaqueline reeled suddenly and sank into a chair—nervously exhausted.

  “Just at this time,” she went on brokenly, “I need you. I need your strength and your health and your arms around me. And if you—if you just give it to every one, it’s spread so thin when it reaches me -”

  He knelt by her side, moving her tired young head until it lay against his shoulder.

  “I’m sorry, Jaqueline,” he said humbly, “I’ll be more careful. I didn’t realize what I was doing.”

  “You’re the dearest person in the world,” murmured Jaqueline huskily, “but I want all of you and the best of you for me.” He smoothed her hair over and over. For a few minutes they rested there silently, having attained a sort of Nirvana of peace and understanding. Then Jaqueline reluctantly raised her head as they were interrupted by the voice of Miss Clancy in the doorway.

  “Oh, I beg your pardon.”

  “What is it?”

  “A boy’s here with some boxes. It’s C. O. D.”

  Mather rose and followed Miss Clancy into the outer office.

  “It’s fifty dollars.”

  He searched his wallet—he had omitted to go to the bank that morning.

  “Just a minute,” he said abstractedly. His mind was on Jaqueline, Jaqueline who seemed forlorn in her trouble, waiting for him in the other room. He walked into the corridor, and opening the door of

  “Clayton and Drake, Brokers” across the way, swung wide a low gate and went up to a man seated at a desk.

  “Morning, Fred,” said Mather.

  Drake, a little man of thirty with pince-nez and bald head, rose and shook hands.

  “Morning, Jim. What can I do for you?”

  “Why, a hoy’s in my office with some stuff C. O. D. and I haven’t a cent. Can you let me have fifty till this
afternoon?”

  Drake looked closely at Mather. Then, slowly and startlingly, he shook his head—not up and down but from side to side.

  “Sorry, Jim,” he answered stiffly, “I’ve made a rule never to make a personal loan to anybody on any conditions. I’ve seen it break up too many friendships.”

  Mather had come out of his abstraction now, and the monosyllable held an undisguised quality of shock. Then his natural tact acted automatically, springing to his aid and dictating his words though his brain was suddenly numb. His immediate instinct was to put Drake at ease in his refusal.

  “Oh, I see.” He nodded his head as if in full agreement, as if he himself had often considered adopting just such a rule. “Oh, I see how you feel. Well—I just—I wouldn’t have you break a rule like that for anything. It’s probably a good thing.”

  They talked for a minute longer. Drake justified his position easily; he had evidently rehearsed the part a great deal. He treated Mather to an exquisitely frank smile.

  Mather went politely back to his office leaving Drake under the impression that the latter was the most tactful man in the city. Mather knew how to leave people with that impression. But when he entered his own office and saw his wife staring dismally out the window into the sunshine he clinched his hands, and his mouth moved in an unfamiliar shape.

  “All right, Jack,” he said slowly, “I guess you’re right about most things, and I’m wrong as hell.”

  III

  During the next three months Mather thought back through many years. He had had an unusually happy life. Those frictions between man and man, between man and society, which harden most of us into a rough and cynical quarrelling trim, had been conspicuous by their infrequency in his life. It had never occurred to him before that he had paid a price for this immunity, but now he perceived how here and there, and constantly, he had taken the rough side of the road to avoid enmity or argument, or even question.

  There was, for instance, much money that he had lent privately about thirteen hundred dollars in all, which he realized, in his new enlightenment, he would never see again. It had taken Jaqueline’s harder, feminine intelligence to know this. It was only now when he owed it to Jaqueline to have money in the bank that he missed these loans at all.

 

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