“Hello, Le Moyne,” said Basil, clipping his words.
Le Moyne turned away, turned back again.
“What’s the matter?” he demanded. “Do you want to carry this any further?”
Basil didn’t answer. The bruised face and the bandaged hand assuaged his hatred a little, but he couldn’t bring himself to speak. The game was over, and now Le Moyne would meet Minnie somewhere, make the defeat negligible in the victory of the night.
“If it’s about Minnie, you’re wasting your time being sore,” Le Moyne exploded suddenly. “I asked her to the game, but she didn’t come.”
“Didn’t she?” Basil was startled.
“That was it, eh? I wasn’t sure. I thought you were just trying to get my goat in there.” His eyes narrowed. “The young lady kicked me about a month ago.”
“Kicked you?”
“Threw me over. Got a little weary of me. She runs through things quickly.”
Basil perceived that his face was miserable.
“Who is it now?” he asked in more civil tone.
“It seems to be a classmate of yours named Jubal--and a mighty sad bird, if you ask me. She met him in New York the day before her school opened, and I hear it’s pretty heavy. She’ll be at the Lawn Club Dance tonight.”
IV
Basil had dinner at the Taft with Jobena Dorsey and her brother George. The Varsity had won at Princeton and the college was jubilant and enthusiastic; as they came in, a table of freshmen by the door gave Basil a hand.
“You’re getting very important,” Jobena said.
A year ago Basil had thought for a few weeks that he was in love with Jobena; when they next met he knew immediately that he was not.
“And why was that?” he asked her now, as they danced. “Why did it all go so quick?”
“Do you really want to know?”
“Yes.”
“Because I let it go.”
“You let it go?” he repeated. “I like that!”
“I decided you were too young.”
“Didn’t I have anything to do with it?”
She shook her head.
“That’s what Bernard Shaw says,” Basil admitted thoughtfully. “But I thought it was just about older people. So you go after the men.”
“Well, I should say not!” Her body stiffened indignantly in his arms. “The men are usually there, and the girl blinks at them or something. It’s just instinct.”
“Can’t a man make a girl fall for him?”
“Some men can--the ones who really don’t care.”
He pondered this awful fact for a moment and stowed it away for future examination. On the way to the Lawn Club he brought forth more questions.
If a girl who had been “crazy about a boy” became suddenly infatuated with another, what ought the first boy to do?
“Let her go,” said Jobena.
“Supposing he wasn’t willing to do that. What ought he to do?”
“There isn’t anything to do.”
“Well, what’s the best thing?”
Laughing, Jobena laid her head on his shoulder.
“Poor Basil,” she said, “I’ll be Laura Jean Libbey and you tell me the whole story.”
He summarized the affair. “You see,” he concluded, “if she was just anybody I could get over it, no matter how much I loved her. But she isn’t--she’s the most popular, most beautiful girl I’ve ever seen. I mean she’s like Messalina and Cleopatra and Salome and all that.”
“Louder,” requested George from the front seat.
“She’s sort of an immortal woman,” continued Basil in a lower voice. “You know, like Madame du Barry and all that sort of thing. She’s not just--”
“Not just like me.”
“No. That is, you’re sort of like her--all the girls I’ve cared about are sort of the same. Oh, Jobena, you know what I mean.”
As the lights of the New Haven Lawn Club loomed up she became obligingly serious:
“There’s nothing to do. I can see that. She’s more sophisticated than you. She staged the whole thing from the beginning, even when you thought it was you. I don’t know why she got tired, but evidently she is, and she couldn’t create it again, even if she wanted to, and you couldn’t because you’re--”
“Go on. What?”
“You’re too much in love. All that’s left for you to do is to show her you don’t care. Any girl hates to lose an old beau; so she may even smile at you--but don’t go back. It’s all over.”
In the dressing room Basil stood thoughtfully brushing his hair. It was all over. Jobena’s words had taken away his last faint hope, and after the strain of the afternoon the realization brought tears to his eyes. Hurriedly filling the bowl, he washed his face. Someone came in and slapped him on the back.
“You played a nice game, Lee.”
“Thanks, but I was rotten.”
“You were great. That last quarter--”
He went into the dance. Immediately he saw her, and in the same breath he was dizzy and confused with excitement. A little dribble of stags pursued her wherever she went, and she looked up at each one of them with the bright-eyed, passionate smile he knew so well. Presently he located her escort and indignantly discovered it was a flip, blatant boy from Hill School he had already noticed and set down as impossible. What quality lurked behind those watery eyes that drew her? How could that raw temperament appreciate that she was one of the immortal sirens of the world?
Having examined Mr. Jubal desperately and in vain for the answers to these questions, he cut in and danced all of twenty feet with her, smiling with cynical melancholy when she said:
“I’m so proud to know you, Basil. Everybody says you were wonderful this afternoon.”
But the phrase was precious to him and he stood against the wall repeating it over to himself, separating it into its component parts and trying to suck out any lurking meaning. If enough people praised him it might influence her. “I’m proud to know you, Basil. Everybody says you were wonderful this afternoon.”
There was a commotion near the door and someone said, “By golly, they got in after all!”
“Who?” another asked.
“Some Princeton freshmen. Their football season’s over and three or four of them broke training at the Hofbrau.”
And now suddenly the curious specter of a young man burst out of the commotion, as a back breaks through a line, and neatly straight-arming a member of the dance committee, rushed unsteadily onto the floor. He wore no collar with his dinner coat, his shirt front had long expelled its studs, his hair and eyes were wild. For a moment he glanced around as if blinded by the lights; then his glance fell on Minnie Bibble and an unmistakable love light came into his face. Even before he reached her he began to call her name aloud in a strained, poignant Southern voice.
Basil sprang forward, but others were before him, and Littleboy Le Moyne, fighting hard, disappeared into the coatroom in a flurry of legs and arms, many of which were not his own. Standing in the doorway. Basil found his disgust tempered with a monstrous sympathy; for Le Moyne, each time his head emerged from under the faucet, spoke desperately of his rejected love.
But when Basil danced with Minnie again, he found her frightened and angry; so much so that she seemed to appeal to Basil for support, made him sit down.
“Wasn’t he a fool?” she cried feelingly. “That sort of thing gives a girl a terrible reputation. They ought to have put him in jail.”
“He didn’t know what he was doing. He played a hard game and he’s all in, that’s all.”
But her eyes filled with tears.
“Oh, Basil,” she pleaded, “am I just perfectly terrible? I never want to be mean to anybody; things just happen.”
He wanted to put his arm around her and tell her she was the most romantic person in the world, but he saw in her eyes that she scarcely perceived him; he was a lay figure--she might have been talking to another girl. He remembered what Jobena had said--t
here was nothing left except to escape with his pride.
“You’ve got more sense.” Her soft voice flowed around him like an enchanted river. “You know that when two people aren’t--aren’t crazy about each other any more, the thing is to be sensible.”
“Of course,” he said, and forced himself to add lightly: “When a thing’s over, it’s over.”
“Oh, Basil, you’re so satisfactory. You always understand.” And now suddenly, for the first time in months, she was actually thinking of him. He would be an invaluable person in any girl’s life, she thought, if that brain of his, which was so annoying sometimes, was really used “to sort of understand.”
He was watching Jobena dance, and Minnie followed his eyes.
“You brought a girl, didn’t you? She’s awfully pretty.”
“Not as pretty as you.”
“Basil.”
Resolutely he refused to look at her, guessing that she had wriggled slightly and folded her hands in her lap. And as he held on to himself an extraordinary thing happened--the world around, outside of her, brightened a little. Presently more freshmen would approach him to congratulate him on the game, and he would like it--the words and the tribute in their eyes. There was a good chance he would start against Harvard next week.
“Basil!”
His heart made a dizzy tour of his chest. Around the corner of his eyes he felt her eyes waiting. Was she really sorry? Should he seize the opportunity to turn to her and say: “Minnie, tell this crazy nut to go jump in the river, and come back to me.” He wavered, but a thought that had helped him this afternoon returned: He had made all his mistakes for this time. Deep inside of him the plea expired slowly.
Jubal the impossible came up with an air of possession, and Basil’s heart went bobbing off around the ballroom in a pink silk dress. Lost again in a fog of indecision, he walked out on the veranda. There was a flurry of premature snow in the air and the stars looked cold. Staring up at them he saw that they were his stars as always--symbols of ambition, struggle and glory. The wind blew through them, trumpeting that high white note for which he always listened, and the thin-blown clouds, stripped for battle, passed in review. The scene was of an unparalleled brightness and magnificence, and only the practiced eye of the commander saw that one star was no longer there.
THE BRIDAL PARTY
Saturday Evening Post (9 August 1930)
There was the usual insincere little note saying: “I wanted you to be the first to know.” It was a double shock to Michael, announcing, as it did, both the engagement and the imminent marriage; which, moreover, was to be held, not in New York, decently and far away, but here in Paris under his very nose, if that could be said to extend over the Protestant Episcopal Church of the Holy Trinity, Avenue George-Cinq. The date was two weeks off, early in June.
At first Michael was afraid and his stomach felt hollow. When he left the hotel that morning, the femme de chambre, who was in love with his fine, sharp profile and his pleasant buoyancy, scented the hard abstraction that had settled over him. He walked in a daze to his bank, he bought a detective story at Smith’s on the Rue de Rivoli, he sympathetically stared for a while at a faded panorama of the battlefields in a tourist-office window and cursed a Greek tout who followed him with a half-displayed packet of innocuous post cards warranted to be very dirty indeed.
But the fear stayed with him, and after a while he recognized it as the fear that now he would never be happy. He had met Caroline Dandy when she was seventeen, possessed her young heart all through her first season in New York, and then lost her, slowly, tragically, uselessly, because he had no money and could make no money; because, with all the energy and good will in the world, he could not find himself; because, loving him still, Caroline had lost faith and begun to see him as something pathetic, futile and shabby, outside the great, shining stream of life toward which she was inevitably drawn.
Since his only support was that she loved him, he leaned weakly on that; the support broke, but still he held on to it and was carried out to sea and washed up on the French coast with its broken pieces still in his hands. He carried them around with him in the form of photographs and packets of correspondence and a liking for a maudlin popular song called “Among My Souvenirs.” He kept clear of other girls, as if Caroline would somehow know it and reciprocate with a faithful heart. Her note informed him that he had lost her forever.
It was a fine morning. In front of the shops in the Rue de Castiglione, proprietors and patrons were on the sidewalk gazing upward, for the Graf Zeppelin, shining and glorious, symbol of escape and destruction--of escape, if necessary, through destruction--glided in the Paris sky. He heard a woman say in French that it would not her astonish if that commenced to let fall the bombs. Then he heard another voice, full of husky laughter, and the void in his stomach froze. Jerking about, he was face to face with Caroline Dandy and her fiancé.
“Why, Michael! Why, we were wondering where you were. I asked at the Guaranty Trust, and Morgan and Company, and finally sent a note to the National City--”
Why didn’t they back away? Why didn’t they back right up, walking backward down the Rue de Castiglione, across the Rue de Rivoli, through the Tuileries Gardens, still walking backward as fast as they could till they grew vague and faded out across the river?
“This is Hamilton Rutherford, my fiancé.”
“We’ve met before.”
“At Pat’s, wasn’t it?”
“And last spring in the Ritz Bar.”
“Michael, where have you been keeping yourself?”
“Around here.” This agony. Previews of Hamilton Rutherford flashed before his eyes--a quick series of pictures, sentences. He remembered hearing that he had bought a seat in 1920 for a hundred and twenty-five thousand of borrowed money, and just before the break sold it for more than half a million. Not handsome like Michael, but vitally attractive, confident, authoritative, just the right height over Caroline there--Michael had always been too short for Caroline when they danced.
Rutherford was saying: “No, I’d like it very much if you’d come to the bachelor dinner. I’m taking the Ritz Bar from nine o’clock on. Then right after the wedding there’ll be a reception and breakfast at the Hotel George-Cinq.”
“And, Michael, George Packman is giving a party day after tomorrow at Chez Victor, and I want you to be sure and come. And also to tea Friday at Jebby West’s; she’d want to have you if she knew where you were. What’s your hotel, so we can send you an invitation? You see, the reason we decided to have it over here is because mother has been sick in a nursing home here and the whole clan is in Paris. Then Hamilton’s mother’s being here too--”
The entire clan; they had always hated him, except her mother; always discouraged his courtship. What a little counter he was in this game of families and money! Under his hat his brow sweated with the humiliation of the fact that for all his misery he was worth just exactly so many invitations. Frantically he began to mumble something about going away.
Then it happened--Caroline saw deep into him, and Michael knew that she saw. She saw through to his profound woundedness, and something quivered inside her, died out along the curve of her mouth and in her eyes. He had moved her. All the unforgettable impulses of first love had surged up once more; their hearts had in some way touched across two feet of Paris sunlight. She took her fiancé’s arm suddenly, as if to steady herself with the feel of it.
They parted. Michael walked quickly for a minute; then he stopped, pretending to look in a window, and saw them farther up the street, walking fast into the Place Vendôme, people with much to do.
He had things to do also--he had to get his laundry.
“Nothing will ever be the same again,” he said to himself. “She will never be happy in her marriage and I will never be happy at all any more.”
The two vivid years of his love for Caroline moved back around him like years in Einstein’s physics. Intolerable memories arose--of rides in the Long Islan
d moonlight; of a happy time at Lake Placid with her cheeks so cold there, but warm just underneath the surface; of a despairing afternoon in a little café on Forty-eighth Street in the last sad months when their marriage had come to seem impossible.
“Come in,” he said aloud.
The concierge with a telegram; brusque because Mr. Curly’s clothes were a little shabby. Mr. Curly gave few tips; Mr. Curly was obviously a petit client.
Michael read the telegram.
“An answer?” the concierge asked.
“No,” said Michael, and then, on an impulse: “Look.”
“Too bad--too bad,” said the concierge. “Your grandfather is dead.”
“Not too bad,” said Michael. “It means that I come into a quarter of a million dollars.”
Too late by a single month; after the first flush of the news his misery was deeper than ever. Lying awake in bed that night, he listened endlessly to the long caravan of a circus moving through the street from one Paris fair to another.
When the last van had rumbled out of hearing and the corners of the furniture were pastel blue with the dawn, he was still thinking of the look in Caroline’s eyes that morning--the look that seemed to say: “Oh, why couldn’t you have done something about it? Why couldn’t you have been stronger, made me marry you? Don’t you see how sad I am?”
Michael’s fists clenched.
“Well, I won’t give up till the last moment,” he whispered. “I’ve had all the bad luck so far, and maybe it’s turned at last. One takes what one can get, up to the limit of one’s strength, and if I can’t have her, at least she’ll go into this marriage with some of me in her heart.”
II
Accordingly he went to the party at Chez Victor two days later, upstairs and into the little salon off the bar where the party was to assemble for cocktails. He was early; the only other occupant was a tall lean man of fifty. They spoke.
“You waiting for George Packman’s party?”
“Yes. My name’s Michael Curly.”
“My name’s--”
Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald UK (Illustrated) Page 260