Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald UK (Illustrated)
Page 254
“I’ve got to have them,” he declared. “I’d rather be dead than go away to school without them.”
“Well, there’s no need of being silly.”
“It’s true--I’d rather be dead. If I can’t have long trousers I don’t see any use in my going away to school.”
His emotion was such that the vision of his demise began actually to disturb his mother.
“Now stop that silly talk and come and eat your breakfast. You can go down and buy some at Barton Leigh’s this morning.”
Mollified, but still torn by the urgency of his desire, Basil strode up and down the room.
“A boy is simply helpless without them,” he declared vehemently. The phrase pleased him and he amplified it. “A boy is simply and utterly helpless without them. I’d rather be dead than go away to school--”
“Basil, stop talking like that. Somebody has been teasing you about it.”
“Nobody’s been teasing me,” he denied indignantly--”nobody at all.”
After breakfast, the maid called him to the phone.
“This is Riply,” said a tentative voice. Basil acknowledged the fact coldly. “You’re not sore about last night, are you?” Riply asked.
“Me? No. Who said I was sore?”
“Nobody. Well, listen, you know about us going to the fireworks together tonight.”
“Yes.” Basil’s voice was still cold.
“Well, one of those girls--the one Elwood had--has got a sister that’s even nicer than she is, and she can come out tonight and you could have her. And we thought we could meet about eight, because the fireworks don’t start till nine.”
“What do?”
“Well, we could go on the Old Mill again. We went around three times more last night.”
There was a moment’s silence. Basil looked to see if his mother’s door was closed.
“Did you kiss yours?” he demanded into the transmitter.
“Sure I did!” Over the wire came the ghost of a silly laugh. “Listen, El thinks he can get his auto. We could call for you at seven.”
“All right,” agreed Basil gruffly, and he added, “I’m going down and get some long pants this morning.”
“Are you?” Again Basil detected ghostly laughter. “Well, you be ready at seven tonight.”
Basil’s uncle met him at Barton Leigh’s clothing store at ten, and Basil felt a touch of guilt at having put his family to all this trouble and expense. On his uncle’s advice, he decided finally on two suits--a heavy chocolate brown for every day and a dark blue for formal wear. There were certain alterations to be made but it was agreed that one of the suits was to be delivered without fail that afternoon.
His momentary contriteness at having been so expensive made him save carfare by walking home from downtown. Passing along Crest Avenue, he paused speculatively to vault the high hydrant in front of the Van Schellinger house, wondering if one did such things in long trousers and if he would ever do it again. He was impelled to leap it two or three times as a sort of ceremonial farewell, and was so engaged when the Van Schellinger limousine turned into the drive and stopped at the front door.
“Oh, Basil,” a voice called.
A fresh delicate face, half buried under a mass of almost white curls, was turned toward him from the granite portico of the city’s second largest mansion.
“Hello, Gladys.”
“Come here a minute, Basil.”
He obeyed. Gladys Van Schellinger was a year younger than Basil--a tranquil, carefully nurtured girl who, so local tradition had it, was being brought up to marry in the East. She had a governess and always played with a certain few girls at her house or theirs, and was not allowed the casual freedom of children in a Midwestern city. She was never present at such rendezvous as the Whartons’ yard, where the others played games in the afternoons.
“Basil, I wanted to ask you something--are you going to the State Fair tonight?”
“Why, yes, I am.”
“Well, wouldn’t you like to come and sit in our box and watch the fireworks?”
Momentarily he considered the matter. He wanted to accept, but he was mysteriously impelled to refuse--to forgo a pleasure in order to pursue a quest that in cold logic did not interest him at all.
“I can’t. I’m awfully sorry.”
A shadow of discontent crossed Gladys’ face. “Oh? Well, come and see me sometime soon, Basil. In a few weeks I’m going East to school.”
He walked on up the street in a state of dissatisfaction. Gladys Van Schellinger had never been his girl, nor indeed anyone’s girl, but the fact that they were starting away to school at the same time gave him a feeling of kinship for her--as if they had been selected for the glamorous adventure of the East, chosen together for a high destiny that transcended the fact that she was rich and he was only comfortable. He was sorry that he could not sit with her in her box tonight.
By three o’clock, Basil, reading the Crimson Sweater up in his room, began giving attentive ear to every ring at the bell. He would go to the head of the stairs, lean over and call, “Hilda, was that a package for me?” And at four, dissatisfied with her indifference, her lack of feeling for important things, her slowness in going to and returning from the door, he moved downstairs and began attending to it himself. But nothing came. He phoned Barton Leigh’s and was told by a busy clerk: “You’ll get that suit. I’ll guarantee that you’ll get that suit.” But he did not believe in the clerk’s honor and he moved out on the porch and watched for Barton Leigh’s delivery wagon.
His mother came home at five. “There were probably more alterations than they thought,” she suggested helpfully. “You’ll probably get it tomorrow morning.”
“Tomorrow morning!” he exclaimed incredulously. “I’ve got to have that suit tonight.”
“Well, I wouldn’t be too disappointed if I were you, Basil. The stores all close at half-past five.”
Basil took one agitated look up and down Holly Avenue. Then he got his cap and started on a run for the street car at the corner. A moment later a cautious afterthought caused him to retrace his steps with equal rapidity.
“If they get here, keep them for me,” he instructed his mother--a man who thought of everything.
“All right,” she promised dryly, “I will.”
It was later than he thought. He had to wait for a trolley, and when he reached Barton Leigh’s he saw with horror that the doors were locked and the blinds drawn. He intercepted a last clerk coming out and explained vehemently that he had to have his suit tonight. The clerk knew nothing about the matter. . . . Was Basil Mr. Schwartze?
No, Basil was not Mr. Schwartze. After a vague argument wherein he tried to convince the clerk that whoever promised him the suit should be fired, Basil went dispiritedly home.
He would not go to the fair without his suit--he would not go at all. He would sit at home and luckier boys would go adventuring along its Great White Way. Mysterious girls, young and reckless, would glide with them through the enchanted darkness of the Old Mill, but because of the stupidity, selfishness and dishonesty of a clerk in a clothing store he would not be there. In a day or so the fair would be over--forever--those girls, of all living girls the most intangible, the most desirable, that sister, said to be nicest of all--would be lost out of his life. They would ride off in Blatz Wildcats into the moonlight without Basil having kissed them. No, all his life--though he would lose the clerk his position: “You see now what your act did to me”--he would look back with infinite regret upon that irretrievable hour. Like most of us, he was unable to perceive that he would have any desires in the future equivalent to those that possessed him now.
He reached home; the package had not arrived. He moped dismally about the house, consenting at half-past six to sit silently at dinner with his mother, his elbows on the table.
“Haven’t you any appetite, Basil?”
“No, thanks,” he said absently, under the impression he had been offered something.
“Oh, that isn’t the reason I can’t eat. I had a sort of headache all afternoon.”
Toward the end of the meal his eye focused abstractedly on some slices of angel cake; with the air of a somnambulist, he ate three.
At seven he heard the sounds that should have ushered in a night of romantic excitement.
The Leaming car stopped outside, and a moment later Riply Buckner rang the bell. Basil rose gloomily.
“I’ll go,” he said to Hilda. And then to his mother, with vague impersonal reproach, “Excuse me a minute. I just want to tell them I can’t go to the fair tonight.”
“But of course you can go, Basil. Don’t be silly. Just because--”
He scarcely heard her. Opening the door, he faced Riply on the steps. Beyond was the Leaming limousine, an old high car, quivering in silhouette against the harvest moon.
Clop-clop-clop! Up the street came the Barton Leigh delivery wagon. Clop-clop! A man jumped out, dumped an iron anchor to the pavement, hurried along the street, turned away, turned back again, came toward them with a long square box in his hand.
“You’ll have to wait a minute,” Basil was calling wildly. “It can’t make any difference. I’ll dress in the library. Look here, if you’re a friend of mine, you’ll wait a minute.” He stepped out on the porch. “Hey, El, I’ve just got my--got to change my clothes. You can wait a minute, can’t you?”
The spark of a cigarette flushed in the darkness as El spoke to the chauffeur; the quivering car came to rest with a sigh and the skies filled suddenly with stars.
Once again the fair--but differing from the fair of the afternoon as a girl in the daytime differs from her radiant presentation of herself at night. The substance of the cardboard booths and plaster palaces was gone, the forms remained. Outlined in lights, these forms suggested things more mysterious and entrancing than themselves, and the people strolling along the network of little Broadways shared this quality, as their pale faces singly and in clusters broke the half darkness.
The boys hurried to their rendezvous, finding the girls in the deep shadow of the Temple of Wheat. Their forms had scarcely merged into a group when Basil became aware that something was wrong. In growing apprehension, he glanced from face to face and, as the introductions were made, he realized the appalling truth--the younger sister was, in point of fact, a fright, squat and dingy, with a bad complexion brooding behind a mask of cheap pink powder and a shapeless mouth that tried ceaselessly to torture itself into the mold of charm.
In a daze he heard Riply’s girl say, “I don’t know whether I ought to go with you. I had a sort of date with another fellow I met this afternoon.”
Fidgeting, she looked up and down the street, while Riply, in astonishment and dismay, tried to take her arm.
“Come on,” he urged. “Didn’t I have a date with you first?”
“But I didn’t know whether you’d come or not,” she said perversely.
Elwood and the two sisters added their entreaties.
“Maybe I could go on the Ferris wheel,” she said grudgingly, “but not the Old Mill. This fellow would be sore.”
Riply’s confidence reeled with the blow; his mouth fell ajar, his hand desperately pawed her arm. Basil stood glancing now with agonized politeness at his own girl, now at the others, with an expression of infinite reproach. Elwood alone was successful and content.
“Let’s go on the Ferris wheel,” he said impatiently. “We can’t stand here all night.”
At the ticket booth the recalcitrant Olive hesitated once more, frowning and glancing about as if she still hoped Riply’s rival would appear.
But when the swooping cars came to rest she let herself be persuaded in, and the three couples, with their troubles, were hoisted slowly into the air.
As the car rose, following the imagined curve of the sky, it occurred to Basil how much he would have enjoyed it in other company, or even alone, the fair twinkling beneath him with new variety, the velvet quality of the darkness that is on the edge of light and is barely permeated by its last attenuations. But he was unable to hurt anyone whom he thought of as an inferior. After a minute he turned to the girl beside him.
“Do you live in St. Paul or Minneapolis?” he inquired formally.
“St. Paul. I go to Number 7 School.” Suddenly she moved closer. “I bet you’re not so slow,” she encouraged him.
He put his arm around her shoulder and found it warm. Again they reached the top of the wheel and the sky stretched out overhead, again they lapsed down through gusts of music from remote calliopes. Keeping his eyes turned carefully away, Basil pressed her to him, and as they rose again into darkness, leaned and kissed her cheek.
The significance of the contact stirred him, but out of the corner of his eye he saw her face--he was thankful when a gong struck below and the machine settled slowly to rest.
The three couples were scarcely reunited outside when Olive uttered a yelp of excitement.
“There he is!” she cried. “That Bill Jones I met this afternoon--that I had the date with.”
A youth of their own age was approaching, stepping like a circus pony and twirling, with the deftness of a drum major, a small rattan cane. Under the cautious alias, the three boys recognized a friend and contemporary--none other than the fascinating Hubert Blair.
He came nearer. He greeted them all with a friendly chuckle. He took off his cap, spun it, dropped it, caught it, set it jauntily on the side of his head.
“You’re a nice one,” he said to Olive. “I waited here fifteen minutes this evening.”
He pretended to belabor her with the cane; she giggled with delight. Hubert Blair possessed the exact tone that all girls of fourteen, and a somewhat cruder type of grown women, find irresistible. He was a gymnastic virtuoso and his figure was in constant graceful motion; he had a jaunty piquant nose, a disarming laugh and a shrewd talent for flattery. When he took a piece of toffee from his pocket, placed it on his forehead, shook it off and caught it in his mouth, it was obvious to any disinterested observer that Riply was destined to see no more of Olive that night.
So fascinated were the group that they failed to see Basil’s eyes brighten with a ray of hope, his feet take four quick steps backward with all the guile of a gentleman burglar, his torso writhe through the parting of a tent wall into the deserted premises of the Harvester and Tractor Show. Once safe, Basil’s tensity relaxed, and as he considered Riply’s unconsciousness of the responsibilities presently to devolve upon him, he bent double with hilarious laughter in the darkness.
Ten minutes later, in a remote part of the fairgrounds, a youth made his way briskly and cautiously toward the fireworks exhibit, swinging as he walked a recently purchased rattan cane. Several girls eyed him with interest, but he passed them haughtily; he was weary of people for a brief moment--a moment which he had almost mislaid in the bustle of life--he was enjoying his long pants.
He bought a bleacher seat and followed the crowd around the race track, seeking his section. A few Union troops were moving cannon about in preparation for the Battle of Gettysburg, and, stopping to watch them, he was hailed by Gladys Van Schellinger from the box behind.
“Oh, Basil, don’t you want to come and sit with us?”
He turned about and was absorbed. Basil exchanged courtesies with Mr. and Mrs. Van Schellinger and he was affably introduced to several other people as “Alice Riley’s boy,” and a chair was placed for him beside Gladys in front.
“Oh, Basil,” she whispered, glowing at him, “isn’t this fun?”
Distinctly, it was. He felt a vast wave of virtue surge through him. How anyone could have preferred the society of those common girls was at this moment incomprehensible.
“Basil, won’t it be fun to go East? Maybe we’ll be on the same train.”
“I can hardly wait,” he agreed gravely. “I’ve got on long pants. I had to have them to go awa
y to school.”
One of the ladies in the box leaned toward him. “I know your mother very well,” she said. “And I know another friend of yours. I’m Riply Buckner’s aunt.”
“Oh, yes!”
“Riply’s such a nice boy,” beamed Mrs. Van Schillinger.
And then, as if the mention of his name had evoked him, Riply Buckner came suddenly into sight. Along the now empty and brightly illuminated race track came a short but monstrous procession, a sort of Lilliputian burlesque of the wild gay life. At its head marched Hubert Blair and Olive, Hubert prancing and twirling his cane like a drum major to the accompaniment of her appreciative screams of laughter. Next followed Elwood Leaming and his young lady, leaning so close together that they walked with difficulty, apparently wrapped in each other’s arms. And bringing up the rear without glory were Riply Buckner and Basil’s late companion, rivaling Olive in exhibitionist sound.
Fascinated, Basil stared at Riply, the expression of whose face was curiously mixed. At moments he would join in the general tone of the parade with silly guffaw, at others a pained expression would flit across his face, as if he doubted that, after all, the evening was a success.
The procession was attracting considerable notice--so much that not even Riply was aware of the particular attention focused upon him from this box, though he passed by it four feet away. He was out of hearing when a curious rustling sigh passed over its inhabitants and a series of discreet whispers began.
“What funny girls,” Gladys said. “Was that first boy Hubert Blair?”
“Yes.” Basil was listening to a fragment of conversation behind:
“His mother will certainly hear of this in the morning.”
As long as Riply had been in sight, Basil had been in an agony of shame for him, but now a new wave of virtue, even stronger than the first, swept over him. His memory of the incident would have reached actual happiness, save for the fact that Riply’s mother might not let him go away to school. And a few minutes later, even that seemed endurable. Yet Basil was not a mean boy. The natural cruelty of his species toward the doomed was not yet disguised by hypocrisy--that was all.