They reached Emil’s. Only in certain Paris restaurants where the Argentines step untiringly through their native coils does anything survive of the dance craze as it existed just before the war. At that time it was not an accompaniment to drinking or love-making or hailing in the dawn--it was an end in itself. Sedentary stockbrokers, grandmothers of sixty, Confederate veterans, venerable statesmen and scientists, sufferers from locomotor ataxia, wanted not only to dance but to dance beautifully. Fantastic ambitions bloomed in hitherto sober breasts, violent exhibitionism cropped out in families modest for generations. Nonentities with long legs became famous overnight, and there were rendezvous where they could renew the dance, if they wished, next morning. Because of a neat glide or an awkward stumble careers were determined and engagements were made or broken, while the tall Englishman and the girl in the Dutch cap called the tune.
As they went into the cabaret sudden anxiety attacked Basil--modern dancing was one of the things upon which John Granby had been most severe.
He approached George Dorsey in the coat room.
“There’s an extra man, so do you suppose I’d be all right if I only danced when there’s a waltz? I’m no good at anything else.”
“Sure. It’s all right with me.” He looked curiously at Basil. “Gosh, have you sworn off everything?”
“No, not everything,” answered Basil uncomfortably.
The floor was already crowded. All ages and several classes of society shuffled around tensely to the nervous, disturbing beats of “Too Much Mustard.” Automatically the other three couples were up and away, leaving Basil at the table. He watched, trying to pretend to himself that he disapproved of it all but was too polite to show it. However, with so much to see, it was difficult to preserve that attitude, and he was gazing with fascination at Jobena’s active feet when a good-looking young man of about nineteen sat down beside him at the table.
“Excuse me,” he said with exaggerated deference. “This Miss Jobena Dorsey’s table?”
“Yes, it is.”
“I’m expected. Name’s De Vinci. Don’t ask me if I’m any relation to the painter.”
“My name’s Lee.”
“All right, Lee. What’ll you have? What are you having?” The waiter arrived with a tray, and De Vinci looked at its contents with disgust. “Tea--all tea. . . . Waiter, bring me a double Bronx. . . . How about you, Lee? Another double Bronx?”
“Oh, no, thanks,” said Basil quickly.
“One then, waiter.”
De Vinci sighed; he had the unmistakable lush look of a man who has been drinking hard for several days.
“Nice dog under that table over there. They oughtn’t to let people smoke if they’re going to bring dogs in here.”
“Why?”
“Hurts their eyes.”
Confusedly Basil deliberated this piece of logic.
“But don’t talk to me about dogs,” said De Vinci with a profound sigh; “I’m trying to keep from thinking of dogs.”
Basil obligingly changed the subject for him by asking him if he was in college.
“Two weeks.” For emphasis De Vinci held up two fingers. “I passed quickly through Yale. First man fired out of ‘15 Sheff.”
“That’s too bad,” said Basil earnestly. He took a deep breath and his lips twisted up in a kindly smile. “Your parents must have felt pretty badly about that.”
De Vinci stared at him as if over a pair of spectacles, but before he could answer, the dance ended and the others came back to the table.
“Hello there, Skiddy.”
“Well, well, Skiddy!”
They all knew him. One of the freshmen yielded him a place next to Jobena and they began to talk together in lowered voices.
“Skiddy De Vinci,” George whispered to Basil. “He and Jobena were engaged last summer, but I think she’s through.” He shook his head. “They used to go off in his mother’s electric up at Bar Harbor; it was disgusting.”
Basil glowed suddenly with excitement as if he had been snapped on like an electric torch. He looked at Jobena--her face, infinitely reserved, lightened momentarily, but this time her smile had gone sad; there was the deep friendliness but not the delight. He wondered if Skiddy De Vinci cared about her being through with him. Perhaps, if he reformed and stopped drinking and went back to Yale, she would change her mind.
The music began again. Basil stared uncomfortably into his cup of tea.
“This is a tango,” said George. “You can dance the tango, can’t you? It’s all right; it’s Spanish.”
Basil considered.
“Sure you can,” insisted George. “It’s Spanish, I tell you. There’s nothing to stop your dancing if it’s Spanish, is there?”
One of the freshmen looked at them curiously. Basil leaned over the table and asked Jobena to dance.
She made a last low-voiced remark to De Vinci before she rose; then, to atone for the slight rudeness, she smiled up at Basil. He was light-headed as they moved out on the floor.
Abruptly she made an outrageous remark and Basil started and nearly stumbled, doubtful that he had heard aright.
“I’ll bet you’ve kissed about a thousand girls in your time,” she said, “with that mouth.”
“What!”
“Not so?”
“Oh, no,” declared Basil. “Really, I--”
Her lids and lashes had drooped again indifferently; she was singing the band’s tune:
“Tango makes you warm inside;
You bend and sway and glide;
There’s nothing far and wide--”
What was the implication--that kissing people was all right; was even admirable? He remembered what John Granby had said: “Every time you kiss a nice girl you may have started her on the road to the devil.”
He thought of his own past--an afternoon on the Kampf’s porch with Minnie Bibble, a ride home from Black Bear Lake with Imogene Bissel in the back seat of the car, a miscellany of encounters running back to games of post office and to childish kisses that were consummated upon an unwilling nose or ear.
That was over; he was never going to kiss another girl until he found the one who would become his wife. It worried him that this girl whom he found lovely should take the matter so lightly. The strange thrill he had felt when George spoke of her “behaving disgustingly” with Skiddy De Vinci in his electric, was transformed into indignation--steadily rising indignation. It was criminal--a girl not yet seventeen.
Suddenly it occurred to him that this was perhaps his responsibility, his opportunity. If he could implant in her mind the futility of it all, the misery she was laying up for herself, his visit to New York would not have been in vain. He could go back to school happy, knowing he had brought to one girl the sort of peace she had never known before.
In fact, the more he thought of Jobena and Skiddy De Vinci in the electric, the madder it made him.
At five they left Emil’s to go to Castle House. There was a thin rain falling and the streets were gleaming. In the excitement of going out into the twilight Jobena slipped her arm quickly through Basil’s.
“There’s too many for the car. Let’s take the hansom.”
She gave the address to a septuagenarian in faded bottle green, and the slanting doors closed upon them, shutting them back away from the rain.
“I’m tired of them,” she whispered. “Such empty faces, except Skiddy’s, and in another hour he won’t be able to even talk straight. He’s beginning to get maudlin about his dog Eggshell that died last month, and that’s always a sign. Do you ever feel the fascination of somebody that’s doomed; who just goes on and on in the way he was born to go, never complaining, never hoping; just sort or resigned to it all?”
His fresh heart cried out against this.
“Nobody has to go to pieces,” he assured her. “They can just turn over a new leaf.”
“Not Skiddy.”
“Anybody,” he insisted. “You just make up your mind and resolve to live a bet
ter life, and you’d be surprised how easy it is and how much happier you are.”
She didn’t seem to hear him.
“Isn’t it nice, rolling along in this hansom with the damp blowing in, and you and I back here”--she turned to him and smiled--”together.”
“Yes,” said Basil abstractedly. “The thing is that everybody should try to make their life perfect. They can’t start young enough; in fact, they ought to start about eleven or twelve in order to make their life absolutely perfect.”
“That’s true,” she said. “In a way Skiddy’s life is perfect. He never worries, never regrets. You could put him back at the time of the--oh, the eighteenth century, or whenever it was they had the bucks and beaux--and he’d fit right in.”
“I didn’t mean that,” said Basil in alarm. “That isn’t at all what I mean by the perfect life.”
“You mean something more masterful,” she supplied. “I thought so, when I saw that chin of yours. I’ll bet you just take everything you want.”
Again she looked at him, swayed close to him.
“You don’t understand--” he began.
She put her hand on his arm. “Wait a minute; we’re almost there. Let’s not go in yet. It’s so nice with all the lights going on and it’ll be so hot and crowded in there. Tell him to drive out a few blocks more. I noticed you only danced a few times; I like that. I hate men that pop up at the first sound of music as if their life depended on it. Is it true you’re only sixteen?”
“Yes.”
“You seem older. There’s so much in your face.”
“You don’t understand--” Basil began again desperately.
She spoke through the trap to the cabby:
“Go up Broadway till we tell you to stop.” Sitting back in the cab, she repeated dreamily, “The perfect life. I’d like my life to be perfect. I’d like to suffer, if I could find something worth suffering for, and I’d like to never do anything low or small or mean, but just have big sins.”
“Oh, no!” said Basil, aghast. “That’s no way to feel; that’s morbid. Why, look, you oughtn’t to talk like that--a girl sixteen years old. You ought to--to talk things over with yourself--you ought to think more of the after life.” He stopped, half expecting to be interrupted, but Jobena was silent. “Why, up to a month ago I used to smoke as many as twelve or fifteen cigarettes a day, unless I was training for football. I used to curse and swear and only write home once in a while, so they had to telegraph sometimes to see if I was sick. I had no sense of responsibility. I never thought I could lead a perfect life until I tried.”
He paused, overcome by his emotion.
“Didn’t you?” said Jobena, in a small voice.
“Never. I was just like everybody else, only worse. I used to kiss girls and never think anything about it.”
“What--what changed you?”
“A man I met.” Suddenly he turned to her and, with an effort, caused to spread over his face a caricature of John Granby’s sad sweet smile. “Jobena, you--you have the makings of a fine girl in you. It grieved me a lot this afternoon to see you smoking nicotine and dancing modern suggestive dances that are simply savagery. And the way you talk about kissing. What if you meet some man that has kept himself pure and never gone around kissing anybody except his family, and you have to tell him that you went around behaving disgustingly?”
She leaned back suddenly and spoke crisply through the panel.
“You can go back now--the address we gave you.”
“You ought to cut it out.” Again Basil smiled at her, straining and struggling to lift her up out of herself to a higher plane. “Promise me you’ll try. It isn’t so hard. And then some day when some upright and straightforward man comes along and says, ‘Will you marry me?’ you’ll be able to say you never danced suggestive modern dances, except the Spanish tango and the Boston, and you never kissed anybody--that is, since you were sixteen, and maybe you wouldn’t have to say that you ever kissed anybody at all.”
“That wouldn’t be the truth,” she said in an odd voice. “Shouldn’t I tell him the truth?”
“You could tell him you didn’t know any better.”
“Oh.”
To Basil’s regret the cab drew up at Castle House. Jobena hurried in, and to make up for her absence, devoted herself exclusively to Skiddy and the Harvard freshmen for the remainder of the afternoon. But doubtless she was thinking hard--as he had done a month before. With a little more time he could have clinched his argument by showing the influence that one leading a perfect life could exert on others. He must find an opportunity tomorrow.
But next day he scarcely saw her. She was out for luncheon and she did not appear at her rendezvous with Basil and George after the matinée; they waited in vain in the Biltmore grill for an hour. There was company at dinner and Basil began to feel a certain annoyance when she disappeared immediately afterwards. Was it possible that his seriousness had frightened her? In that case it was all the more necessary to see her, reassure her, bind her with the invisible cords of high purpose to himself. Perhaps--perhaps she was the ideal girl that he would some day marry. At the gorgeous idea his whole being was flooded with ecstasy. He planned out the years of waiting, each one helping the other to lead the perfect life, neither of them ever kissing anybody else--he would insist on that, absolutely insist on it; she must promise not even to see Skiddy De Vinci--and then marriage and a life of service, perfection, fame and love.
The two boys went to the theatre again that night. When they came home a little after eleven, George went upstairs to say good night to his mother, leaving Basil to make reconnaissance in the ice box. The intervening pantry was dark and as he fumbled unfamiliarly for the light he was startled by hearing a voice in the kitchen pronounce his name:
“--Mr. Basil Duke Lee.”
“Seemed all right to me.” Basil recognized the drawling tone of Skiddy De Vinci. “Just a kid.”
“On the contrary, he’s a nasty little prig,” said Jobena decisively. “He gave me the old-fashioned moral lecture about nicotine and modern dancing and kissing, and about that upright, straightforward man that was going to come along some day--you know that upright straightforward man they’re always talking about. I suppose he meant himself, because he told me he led a perfect life. Oh, it was all so oily and horrible, it made me positively sick. Skiddy. For the first time in my life I was tempted to take a cocktail.”
“Oh, he’s just a kid,” said Skiddy moderately. “It’s a phase. He’ll get over it.”
Basil listened in horror; his face burning, his mouth ajar. He wanted above all things to get away, but his dismay rooted him to the floor.
“What I think of righteous men couldn’t be put on paper,” said Jobena after a moment. “I suppose I’m just naturally bad, Skiddy; at least, all my contacts with upright young men have affected me like this.”
“Then how about it, Jobena?”
There was a long silence.
“This has done something to me,” she said finally. “Yesterday I thought I was through with you, Skiddy, but ever since this happened I’ve had a vision of a thousand Mr. Basil Duke Lees, all grown up and asking me to share their perfect lives. I refuse to--definitely. If you like, I’ll marry you in Greenwich tomorrow.”
III
At one Basil’s light was still burning. Walking up and down his room, he made out case after case for himself, with Jobena in the role of villainness, but each case was wrecked upon the rock of his bitter humiliation. “A nasty little prig”--the words, uttered with conviction and scorn, had driven the high principles of John Granby from his head. He was a slave to his own admirations, and in the past twenty-four hours Jobena’s personality had become the strongest force in his life; deep in his heart he believed that what she had said was true.
He woke up on Thanksgiving morning with dark circles rimming his eyes. His bag, packed for immediate departure, brought back the debacle of the night before, and as he lay staring at the ceiling
, relaxed by sleep, giant tears welled up into his eyes. An older man might have taken refuge behind the virtue of his intentions, but Basil knew no such refuge. For sixteen years he had gone his own way without direction, due to his natural combativeness and to the fact that no older man save John Granby had yet captured his imagination. Now John Granby had vanished in the night, and it seemed the natural thing to Basil that he should struggle back to rehabilitation unguided and alone.
One thing he knew--Jobena must not marry Skiddy De Vinci. That was a responsibility she could not foist upon him. If necessary, he would go to her father and tell what he knew.
Emerging from his room half an hour later, he met her in the hall. She was dressed in a smart blue street suit with a hobble skirt and a ruff of linen at her throat. Her eyes opened a little and she wished him a polite good morning.
“I’ve got to talk to you,” he said quickly.
“I’m terribly sorry.” To his intense discomfort she flashed her smile at him, just as if nothing had happened. “I’ve only a minute now.”
“It’s something very important. I know you don’t like me--”
“What nonsense!” She laughed cheerfully. “Of course I like you. How did you get such a silly idea in your head?”
Before he could answer, she waved her hand hastily and ran down the stairs.
George had gone to town and Basil spent the morning walking through large deliberate snowflakes in Central Park rehearsing what he should say to Mr. Dorsey.
Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald UK (Illustrated) Page 210