Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald UK (Illustrated)

by F. Scott Fitzgerald

  Not that Josephine was very tall; she was an exquisite size for seventeen and of a beauty that was flowering marvelously day by day into something richer and warmer. People gasped nowadays, whereas a year ago they would merely have stared, and scarcely glanced at her a year before that. She was manifestly to be the spectacular débutante of Chicago next year, in spite of the fact that she was an egotist who played not for popularity but for individual men. While Josephine always recovered, the men frequently didn’t--her mail from Chicago, from New Haven, from the Yale Battery on the border, averaged a dozen letters a day.

  This was in the fall of 1916, with the thunder of far-off guns already growing louder on the air. When the two girls started for the Princeton prom two days later, they carried with them the Poems of Alan Seeger, supplemented by copies of Smart Set and Snappy Stories, bought surreptitiously at the station news stand. When compared to a seventeen-year-old girl of today, Lillian Hammel was an innocent; Josephine Perry, however, belonged to the ages.

  They read nothing en route save a few love epigrams beginning: “A woman of thirty is--” The train was crowded and a sustained, excited chatter flowed along the aisles of the coaches. There were very young girls in a gallantly concealed state of terror; there were privately bored girls who would never see twenty-five again; there were unattractive girls, blandly unconscious of what was in store; and there were little, confident parties who felt as though they were going home.

  “They say it’s not like Yale,” said Josephine. “They don’t do things so elaborately here. They don’t rush you from place to place, from one tea to another, like they do at New Haven.”

  “Will you ever forget that divine time last spring?” exclaimed Lillian.

  They both sighed.

  “At least there’ll be Louie Randall,” said Josephine.

  There would indeed be Louie Randall, whom Josephine had seen fit to invite herself, without the formality of telling her Princeton escort that he was coming. The escort, at that moment pacing up and down at the station platform with many other young men, was probably under the impression that it was his party. But he was wrong; it was Josephine’s party; even Lillian was coming with another Princeton man, named Martin Munn, whom Josephine had thoughtfully provided. “Please ask her,” she had written. “We’ll manage to see a lot of each other, if you do, because the man I’m coming with isn’t really very keen about me, so he won’t mind.”

  But Paul Dempster cared a lot; so much so that when the train came puffing up from the Junction he gulped a full pint of air, which is a mild form of swooning. He had been devoted to Josephine for a year--long after her own interest had waned--he had long lost any power of judging her objectively; she was become simply a projection of his own dreams, a radiant, nebulous mass of light.

  But Josephine saw Paul clearly enough as they stepped off the train. She gave herself up to him immediately, as if to get it over with, to clear the decks for more vital action.

  “So thrilled--so thrilled! So darling to ask me!” Immemorial words, still doing service after fifteen years.

  She took his arm snugly, settling it in hers with a series of little readjustments, as if she wanted it right because it was going to be there forever.

  “I bet you’re not glad to see me at all,” she whispered. “I’ll bet you’ve forgotten me. I know you.”

  Rudimentary stuff, but it sent Paul Dempster into a confused and happy trance. He had the adequate surface of nineteen, but, within, all was still in a ferment of adolescence.

  He could only answer gruffly: “Big chance.” And then: “Martin had a chemistry lab. He’ll meet us at the club.”

  Slowly the crowd of youth swirled up the steps and beneath Blair arch, floating in an autumn dream and scattering the yellow leaves with their feet. Slowly they moved between stretches of greensward under the elms and cloisters, with breath misty upon the crisp evening, following the hope that lay just ahead, the goal of happiness almost reached.

  They sat before a big fire in the Witherspoon Club, the largest of those undergraduate mansions for which Princeton is famous. Martin Munn, Lillian’s escort, was a quiet, handsome boy whom Josephine had met several times, but whose sentimental nature she had not explored. Now, with the phonograph playing Down Among the Sheltering Palms, with the soft orange light of the great room glowing upon the scattered groups, who seemed to have brought in the atmosphere of infinite promise from outside, Josephine looked at him appraisingly. A familiar current of curiosity coursed through her; already her replies to Paul had grown abstracted. But still in the warm enchantment of the walk from the station, Paul did not notice. He was far from guessing that he had already been served his ration; of special attention he would get no more. He was now cast for another rôle.

  At the exact moment when it was suggested that they dress for dinner the party became aware of an individual who had just entered the club and was standing by the entrance looking not exactly at home, for he blinked about unfamiliarly, but not in the least ill at ease. He was tall, with long, dancing legs, and his face was that of an old, experienced weasel to whom no henhouse was impregnable.

  “Why, Louie Randall!” exclaimed Josephine in a tone of astonishment.

  She talked to him for a moment as if unwillingly, and then introduced him all around, meanwhile whispering to Paul: “He’s a boy from New Haven. I never dreamed he’d follow me down here.”

  Randall within a few minutes was somehow one of the party. He had a light and witty way about him; no dark suspicions had penetrated Paul’s mind.

  “Oh, by the way,” said Louie Randall, “I wonder if I can find a place to change my clothes. I’ve got a suitcase outside.”

  There was a pause. Josephine was apparently uninterested. The pause grew difficult, and Paul heard himself saying: “You can change in my room if you want to.”

  “I don’t want to put you out.”

  “Not at all.”

  Josephine raised her eyebrows at Paul, disclaiming responsibility for the man’s presumption; a moment later, Randall said: “Do you live near here?”

  “Pretty near.”

  “Because I have a taxi and I could take you there if you’re going to change, and you could show me where it is. I don’t want to put you out.”

  The repetition of this ambiguous statement suggested that otherwise Paul might find his belongings in the street. He rose unwillingly; he did not hear Josephine whisper to Martin Munn: “Please don’t you go yet.” But Lillian did, and without minding at all. Her love affairs never conflicted with Josephine’s, which is why they had been intimate friends so long. When Louie Randall and his involuntary host had departed, she excused herself and went to dress upstairs.

  “I’d like to see all over the clubhouse,” suggested Josephine. She felt the old excitement mounting in her pulse, felt her cheeks begin to glow like an electric heater.

  “These are the private dining rooms,” Martin explained as they walked around. . . . “The billiard room. . . . The squash courts. . . . This library is modeled on something in a Cercersion monastery in--in India or somewhere. . . . This”--he opened a door and peered in--”this is the president’s room, but I don’t know where the light is.”

  Josephine walked in with a little laugh. “It’s very nice in here,” she said. “You can’t see anything at all. Oh, what have I run into? Come and save me!”

  When they emerged a few minutes later, Martin smoothed back his hair hurriedly.

  “You darling!” he said.

  Josephine made a funny little clicking sound.

  “What is it?” he demanded. “Why have you got such a funny look on your face?”

  Josephine didn’t answer.

  “Have I done something? Are you angry? You look as if you’d seen a ghost,” he said.

  “You haven’t done anything,” she answered, and added, with an effort: “You were--sweet.” She shuddered. “Show me my room, will you?”

  “How strange,” she was thinki
ng. “He’s so attractive, but I didn’t enjoy kissing him at all. For the first time in my life--even when it was a man I didn’t especially care for--I had no feeling about him at all. I’ve often been bored afterward, but at the time it’s always meant something.”

  The experience depressed her more than she could account for. This was only her second prom, but neither before nor after did she ever enjoy one so little. She had never been more enthusiastically rushed, but through it all she seemed to float in a detached dream. The men were not individuals tonight, but dummies; men from Princeton, men from New Haven, new men, old beaus--were all as unreal as sticks. She wondered if her face wore that bovine expression she had often noted on the faces of stupid and apathetic girls.

  “It’s a mood,” she told herself. “I’m just tired.”

  But next day, at a bright and active luncheon, she seemed to herself to have less vivacity than the dozen girls who boasted wanly that they hadn’t gone to bed at all. After the football game she walked with Paul Dempster to the station, trying contritely to give him the last end of the week-end, as she had given him the beginning.

  “Then why won’t you go to the theater with us tonight?” he was pleading. “That was the understanding in my letter. We were to come to New York with you and all go to the theater.”

  “Because,” she explained patiently, “Lillian and I have to be back to school by eight. That’s the only condition on which we were allowed to come.”

  “Oh, hell,” he said. “I’ll bet you’re doing something tonight with that Randall.”

  She denied this scornfully, but Paul was suddenly realizing that Randall had dined with them, Randall had slept upon his couch, and Randall, though at the game he had sat on the Yale side of the field, was somehow with them now.

  His was the last face that Paul saw as the train pulled out for the Junction.

  He had thanked Paul very graciously and asked him to stay with him if he was ever in New Haven.

  Nevertheless, if the miserable Princetonian had witnessed a scene in the Pennsylvania Station an hour later, his pain would have been moderated, for now Louie Randall was arguing bitterly:

  “But why not take a chance? The chaperon doesn’t know what time you have to be in.”

  “We do.”

  When finally he had accepted the inevitable and departed, Josephine sighed and turned to Lillian.

  “Where are we going to meet Wallie and Joe? At the Ritz?”

  “Yes, and we’d better hurry,” said Lillian. “The Follies begin at nine.”

  II

  It had been like that for almost a year--a game played with technical mastery, but with the fire and enthusiasm gone--and Josephine was still a month short of eighteen. One evening during Thanksgiving vacation, as they waited for dinner in the library of Christine Dicer’s house on Gramercy Park, Josephine said to Lillian:

  “I keep thinking how excited I’d have been a year ago. A new place, a new dress, meeting new men.”

  “You’ve been around too much, dearie; you’re blasé.”

  Josephine bridled impatiently: “I hate that word, and it’s not true. I don’t care about anything in the world except men, and you know it. But they’re not like they used to be. . . . What are you laughing at?”

  “When you were six years old they were different?”

  “They were. They used to have more spirit when we played drop-the-handkerchief--even the little Ikeys that used to come in the back gate. The boys at dancing school were so exciting; they were all so sweet. I used to wonder what it would be like to kiss every one of them, and sometimes it was wonderful. And then came Travis and Tony Harker and Ridge Saunders and Ralph and John Bailey, and finally I began to realize that I was doing it all. They were nothing, most of them--not heroes or men of the world or anything I thought. They were just easy. That sounds conceited, but it’s true.”

  She paused for a moment.

  “Last night in bed I was thinking of the sort of man I really could love, but he’d be different from anybody I’ve ever met. He’d have to have certain things. He wouldn’t necessarily be very handsome, but pleasant looking; and with a good figure, and strong. Then he’d have to have some kind of position in the world, or else not care whether he had one or not; if you see what I mean. He’d have to be a leader, not just like everybody else. And dignified, but very pash, and with lots of experience, so I’d believe everything he said or thought was right. And every time I looked at him I’d have to get that thrill I sometimes get out of a new man; only with him I’d have to get it over and over every time I looked at him, all my life.”

  “And you’d want him to be very much in love with you. That’s what I’d want first of all.”

  “Of course,” said Josephine abstractedly, “but principally I’d want to be always sure of loving him. It’s much more fun to love someone than to be loved by someone.”

  There were footsteps in the hall outside and a man walked into the room. He was an officer in the uniform of the French aviation--a glove-fitting tunic of horizon blue, and boots and belt that shone like mirrors in the lamplight. He was young, with gray eyes that seemed to be looking off into the distance, and a red-brown military mustache. Across his left breast was a line of colored ribbons, and there were gold-embroidered stripes on his arms and wings on his collar.

  “Good evening,” he said courteously. “I was directed in here. I hope I’m not breaking into something.”

  Josephine did not move; from head to foot she saw him, and as she watched he seemed to come nearer, filling her whole vision. She heard Lillian’s voice, and then the officer’s voice, saying:

  “My name’s Dicer; I’m Christine’s cousin. Do you mind if I smoke a cigarette?”

  He didn’t sit down. He moved about the room and turned over a magazine, not oblivious to their presence, but as if respecting their conversation. But when he saw that silence had fallen, he sat against a table near them with his arms folded and smiled at them.

  “You’re in the French army,” Lillian ventured.

  “Yes, I’ve just got back, and very glad to be here.”

  He didn’t look glad, Josephine noticed. He looked as if he wanted to get out now, but had no place to go to.

  For the first time in her life she felt no confidence. She had absolutely nothing to say. She hoped the emptiness that she had felt ever since her soul poured suddenly out toward his beautiful image didn’t show in her face. She made her lips into a smile, and kept thinking how once, long ago, Travis de Coppet had worn his uncle’s opera cloak to dancing school and suddenly seemed like a man out of the great world. So, now, the war overseas had gone on so long, touched us so little, save for confining us to our own shores, that it had a legendary quality about it, and the figure before her seemed to have stepped out of a gigantic red fairy tale.

  She was glad when the other dinner guests came and the room filled with people, strangers she could talk to or laugh with or yawn at, according to their deserts. She despised the girls fluttering around Captain Dicer, but she admired him for not showing by a flicker of his eye that he either enjoyed it or hated it. Especially she disliked a tall, possessive blonde who once passed, her hand on his arm; he should have flicked away with a handkerchief the contamination of his immaculateness.

  They went in to dinner; he was far away from her, and she was glad. All she could see of him was his blue cuff farther up the table when he reached for a glass, but she felt that they were alone together, none the less because he did not know.

  The man next to her gave her the superfluous information that he was a hero:

  “He’s Christine’s cousin, brought up in France, and joined at the beginning of the war. He was shot down behind the German lines and escaped by jumping off a train. There was a lot about it in the papers. I think he’s over here on some kind of propaganda work. . . . Great horseman too. Everybody likes him.”

  After dinner she sat quietly while two men talked over her, sat persistently willing
him to come to her. Ah, but she would be so nice, avoiding any curiosity or sentimentality about his experiences, avoiding any of the things that must have bored and embarrassed him since he had been home. She heard the voices around him:

  “Captain Dicer. . . . Germans crucify all the Canadian soldiers they capture. . . . How much longer do you think the war . . . to be behind the enemy lines. . . . Were you frightened?” And then a heavy, male voice telling him about it, between puffs of a cigar: “The way I see it, Captain Dicer, neither side is getting anywhere. It strikes me they’re afraid of each other.”

  It seemed a long time later that he came over to her, but at just the right moment, when there was a vacant seat beside her and he could slip into it.

  “I wanted to talk to the prettiest girl for a while. I’ve wanted to all evening; it’s been pretty heavy going.”

  Josephine wanted to lean against the shining leather of his belt, and more, she wanted to take his head in her lap. All her life had pointed toward this moment. She knew what he wanted, and gave it to him; not words, but a smile of warmth and delight--a smile that said, “I’m yours for the asking; I’m won.” It was not a smile that undervalued herself, because through its beauty it spoke for both of them, expressed all the potential joy that existed between them.

  “Who are you?” he asked.

  “I’m a girl.”

  “I thought you were a flower. I wondered why they put you on a chair.”

  “Vive la France,” answered Josephine demurely. She dropped her eyes to his chest. “Do you collect stamps, too, or only coins?”

  He laughed. “It’s good to meet an American girl again. I hoped they’d at least put me across from you at table, so I could rest my eyes on you.”

  “I could see your cuff.”

  “I could see your arm. At least--yes, I thought it was your green bracelet.”

  Later he suggested: “Why couldn’t you come out with me one of these evenings?”

  “It’s not done. I’m still in school.”