Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald UK (Illustrated)

by F. Scott Fitzgerald

  “Why didn’t you? Why didn’t you?” insisted Abercrombie in an aggrieved tone.

  “Well,” Hemmick hesitated. “Well, I right near did but — things didn’t work out and I didn’t get to go. It was a funny sort of business. It all started about the smallest thing you can think of. It all started about a penny.”

  “A penny?”

  “That’s what did it — one little penny. That’s why I didn’t go ‘way from here and all, like I intended.”

  “Tell me about it, man!” exclaimed his companion. He looked at his watch impatiently. “I’d like to hear the story.”

  Hemmick sat for a moment, distorting his mouth around the cigar.

  “Well, to begin with,” he said, at length, “I’m going to ask you if you remember a thing that happened here about twenty-five years ago. A fellow named Hoyt, the cashier of the Cotton National Bank, disappeared one night with about thirty thousand dollars in cash. Say, man, they didn’t talk about anything else down here at the time. The whole town was shaken up about it, and I reckin you can imagine the disturbance it caused down at all the banks and especially at the Cotton National.”

  “I remember.”

  “Well, they caught him, and they got most of the money back, and by and by the excitement died down, except in the bank where the thing had happened. Down there it seemed as if they’d never get used to it. Mr. Deems, the First Vice-President, who’d always been pretty kind and decent, got to be a changed man. He was suspicious of the clerks, the tellers, the janitor, the watchman, most of the officers, and yes, by Golly, I guess he got so he kept an eye on the President himself.

  “I don’t mean he was just watchful — he was downright hipped on the subject. He’d come up and ask you funny questions when you were going about your business. He’d walk into the teller’s cage on tip-toe and watch him without saying anything. If there was any mistake of any kind in the bookkeeping, he’d not only fire a clerk or so, but he’d raise such a riot that he made you want to push him into a vault and slam the door on him.

  “He was just about running the bank then, and he’d affected the other officers, and — oh, you can imagine the havoc a thing like that could work on any sort of an organization. Everybody was so nervous that they made mistakes whether they were careful or not. Clerks were staying downtown until eleven at night trying to account for a lost nickel. It was a thin year, anyhow, and everything financial was pretty rickety, so one thing worked on another until the crowd of us were as near craziness as anybody can be and carry on the banking business at all.

  “I was a runner — and all through the heat of one God-forsaken Summer I ran. I ran and I got mighty little money for it, and that was the time I hated that bank and this town, and all I wanted was to get out and go North. I was getting ten dollars a week, and I’d decided that when I’d saved fifty out of it I was going down to the depot and buy me a ticket to Cincinnati. I had an uncle in the banking business there, and he said he’d give me an opportunity with him. But he never offered to pay my way, and I guess he thought if I was worth having I’d manage to get up there by myself. Well, maybe I wasn’t worth having because, anyhow, I never did.

  “One morning on the hottest day of the hottest July I ever knew — and you know what that means down here — I left the bank to call on a man named Harlan and collect some money that’d come due on a note. Harlan had the cash waiting for me all right, and when I counted it I found it amounted to three hundred dollars and eighty-six cents, the change being in brand-new coin that Harlan had drawn from another bank that morning. I put the three one-hundred-dollar bills in my wallet and the change in my watch pocket, signed a receipt and left. I was going straight back to the bank.

  “Outside the heat was terrible. It was enough to make you dizzy, and I hadn’t been feeling right for a couple of days, so, while I waited in the shade for a street car, I was congratulating myself that in a month or so I’d be out of this and up where it was some cooler. And then as I stood there it occurred to me all of a sudden that outside of the money which I’d just collected, which, of course, I couldn’t touch, I didn’t have a cent in my pocket. I’d have to walk back to the bank, and it was about fifteen blocks away. You see, on the night before, I’d found that my change came to just a dollar, and I’d traded it for a bill at the corner store and added it to the roll in the bottom of my trunk. So there was no help for it — I took off my coat and I stuck my handkerchief into my collar and struck off through the suffocating heat for the bank.

  “Fifteen blocks — you can imagine what that was like, and I was sick when I started. From away up by Juniper Street — you remember where that is; the new Mieger Hospital’s there now — all the way down to Jackson. After about six blocks I began to stop and rest whenever I found a patch of shade wide enough to hold me, and as I got pretty near I could just keep going by thinking of the big glass of iced tea my mother’d have waiting beside my plate at lunch. But after that I began getting too sick to even want the iced tea — I wanted to get rid of that money and then lie down and die.

  “When I was still about two blocks away from the bank I put my hand into my watch pocket and pulled out that change; was sort of jingling it in my hand; making myself believe that I was so close that it was convenient to have it ready. I happened to glance into my hand, and all of a sudden I stopped up short and reached down quick into my watch pocket. The pocket was empty. There was a little hole in the bottom, and my hand held only a half dollar, a quarter, and a dime. I had lost one cent.

  “Well, sir, I can’t tell you, I can’t express to you the feeling of discouragement that this gave me. One penny, mind you — but think: just the week before a runner had lost his job because he was a little bit shy twice. It was only carelessness; but there you were! They were all in a panic that they might get fired themselves, and the best thing to do was to fire some one else — first.

  “So you can see that it was up to me to appear with that penny.

  “Where I got the energy to care as much about it as I did is more than I can understand. I was sick and hot and weak as a kitten, but it never occurred to me that I could do anything except find or replace that penny, and immediately I began casting about for a way to do it. I looked into a couple of stores, hoping I’d see some one I knew, but while there were a few fellows loafing in front, just as you saw them today, there wasn’t one that I felt like going up to and saying: ‘Here! You got a penny?’ I thought of a couple of offices where I could have gotten it without much trouble, but they were some distance off, and besides being pretty dizzy, I hated to go out of my route when I was carrying bank money, because it looked kind of strange.

  “So what should I do but commence walking back along the street toward the Union Depot where I last remembered having the penny. It was a brand-new penny, and I thought maybe I’d see it shining where it dropped. So I kept walking, looking pretty carefully at the sidewalk and thinking what I’d better do. I laughed a little, because I felt sort of silly for worrying about a penny, but I didn’t enjoy laughing, and it really didn’t seem silly to me at all.

  “Well, by and by I got back to the Union Depot without having either seen the old penny or having thought what was the best way to get another. I hated to go all the way home, ‘cause we lived a long distance out; but what else was I to do? So I found a piece of shade close to the depot, and stood there considering, thinking first one thing and then another, and not getting anywhere at all. One little penny, just one — something almost any man in sight would have given me; something even the nigger baggage-smashers were jingling around in their pockets… I must have stood there about five minutes. I remember there was a line of about a dozen men in front of an army recruiting station they’d just opened, and a couple of them began to yell: ‘Join the Army!’ at me. That woke me up, and I moved on back toward the bank, getting worried now, getting mixed up and sicker and sicker and knowing a million ways to find a penny and not one that seemed convenient or right. I was exagge
rating the importance of losing it, and I was exaggerating the difficulty of finding another, but you just have to believe that it seemed about as important to me just then as though it were a hundred dollars.

  “Then I saw a couple of men talking in front of Moody’s soda place, and recognized one of them — Mr. Burling — who’d been a friend of my father’s. That was relief, I can tell you. Before I knew it I was chattering to him so quick that he couldn’t follow what I was getting at.

  “‘Now,’ he said, ‘you know I’m a little deaf and can’t understand when you talk that fast! What is it you want, Henry? Tell me from the beginning.’

  “‘Have you got any change with you?’ I asked him just as loud as I dared. ‘I just want — ‘ Then I stopped short; a man a few feet away had turned around and was looking at us. It was Mr. Deems, the First Vice-President of the Cotton National Bank.”

  Hemmick paused, and it was still light enough for Abercrombie to see that he was shaking his head to and fro in a puzzled way. When he spoke his voice held a quality of pained surprise, a quality that it might have carried over twenty years.

  “I never could understand what it was that came over me then. I must have been sort of crazy with the heat — that’s all I can decide. Instead of just saying, ‘Howdy’ to Mr. Deems, in a natural way, and telling Mr. Burling I wanted to borrow a nickel for tobacco, because I’d left my purse at home, I turned away quick as a flash and began walking up the street at a great rate, feeling like a criminal who had come near being caught.

  “Before I’d gone a block I was sorry. I could almost hear the conversation that must’ve been taking place between those two men:

  “‘What do you reckon’s the matter with that young man?’ Mr. Burling would say without meaning any harm. ‘Came up to me all excited and wanted to know if I had any money, and then he saw you and rushed away like he was crazy.’

  “And I could almost see Mr. Deems’ big eyes get narrow with suspicion and watch him twist up his trousers and come strolling along after me. I was in a real panic now, and no mistake. Suddenly I saw a one-horse surrey going by, and recognized Bill Kennedy, a friend of mine, driving it. I yelled at him, but he didn’t hear me. Then I yelled again, but he didn’t pay any attention, so I started after him at a run, swaying from side to side, I guess, like I was drunk, and calling his name every few minutes. He looked around once, but he didn’t see me; he kept right on going and turned out of sight at the next comer. I stopped then because I was too weak to go any farther. I was just about to sit down on the curb and rest when I looked around, and the first thing I saw was Mr. Deems walking after me as fast as he could come. There wasn’t any of my imagination about it this time — the look in his eyes showed he wanted to know what was the matter with me!

  “Well, that’s about all I remember clearly until about twenty minutes later, when I was at home trying to unlock my trunk with fingers that were trembling like a tuning fork. Before I could get it open, Mr. Deems and a policeman came in. I began talking all at once about not being a thief and trying to tell them what had happened, but I guess I was sort of hysterical, and the more I said the worse matters were. When I managed to get the story out it seemed sort of crazy, even to me — and it was true — it was true, true as I’ve told you — every word! — that one penny that I lost somewhere down by the station — “ Hemmick broke off and began laughing grotesquely — as though the excitement that had come over him as he finished his tale was a weakness of which he was ashamed. When he resumed it was with an affectation of nonchalance.

  “I’m not going into the details of what happened because nothing much did — at least not on the scale you judge events by up North. It cost me my job, and I changed a good name for a bad one. Somebody tattled and somebody lied, and the impression got around that I’d lost a lot of the bank’s money and had been tryin’ to cover it up.

  “I had an awful time getting a job after that. Finally I got a statement out of the bank that contradicted the wildest of the stories that had started, but the people who were still interested said it was just because the bank didn’t want any fuss or scandal — and the rest had forgotten: that is they’d forgotten what had happened, but they remembered that somehow I just wasn’t a young fellow to be trusted — — “

  Hemmick paused and laughed again, still without enjoyment, but bitterly, uncomprehendingly, and with a profound helplessness.

  “So, you see, that’s why I didn’t go to Cincinnati,” he said slowly; “my mother was alive then, and this was a pretty bad blow to her. She had an idea — one of those old-fashioned Southern ideas that stick in people’s heads down here — that somehow I ought to stay here in town and prove myself honest. She had it on her mind, and she wouldn’t hear of my going. She said that the day I went’d be the day she’d die. So I sort of had to stay till I’d got back my — my reputation.”

  “How long did that take?” asked Abercrombie quietly.

  “About — ten years.”

  “Oh — — “

  “Ten years,” repeated Hemmick, staring out into the gathering darkness. “This is a little town, you see: I say ten years because it was about ten years when the last reference to it came to my ears. But I was married long before that; had a kid. Cincinnati was out of my mind by that time.”

  “Of course,” agreed Abercrombie.

  They were both silent for a moment — then Hemmick added apologetically:

  “That was sort of a long story, and I don’t know if it could have interested you much. But you asked me — — “

  “It did interest me,” answered Abercrombie politely. “It interested me tremendously. It interested me much more than I thought it would.”

  It occurred to Hemmick that he himself had never realized what a curious, rounded tale it was. He saw dimly now that what had seemed to him only a fragment, a grotesque interlude, was really significant, complete. It was an interesting story; it was the story upon which turned the failure of his life. Abercrombie’s voice broke in upon his thoughts.

  “You see, it’s so different from my story,” Abercrombie was saying. “It was an accident that you stayed — and it was an accident that I went away. You deserve more actual — actual credit, if there is such a thing in the world, for your intention of getting out and getting on. You see, I’d more or less gone wrong at seventeen. I was — well, what you call a Jelly-bean. All I wanted was to take it easy through life — and one day I just happened to see a sign up above my head that had on it: ‘Special rate to Atlanta, three dollars and forty-two cents.’ So I took out my change and counted it — — “

  Hemmick nodded. Still absorbed in his own story, he had forgotten the importance, the comparative magnificence of Abercrombie. Then suddenly he found himself listening sharply:

  “I had just three dollars and forty-one cents in my pocket. But, you see, I was standing in line with a lot of other young fellows down by the Union Depot about to enlist in the army for three years. And I saw that extra penny on the walk not three feet away. I saw it because it was brand new and shining in the sun like gold.”

  The Alabama night had settled over the street, and as the blue drew down upon the dust the outlines of the two men had become less distinct, so that it was not easy for any one who passed along the walk to tell that one of these men was of the few and the other of no importance. All the detail was gone — Abercrombie’s fine gold wrist watch, his collar, that he ordered by the , dozen from London, the dignity that sat upon him in his chair — all faded and were engulfed with Hemmick’s awkward suit and preposterous humped shoes into that pervasive depth of night that, like death, made nothing matter, nothing differentiate, nothing remain. And a little later on a passerby saw only the two glowing disks about the size of a penny that marked the rise and fall of their cigars.

  THE PUSHER-IN-THE-FACE

  The last prisoner was a man — his masculinity was not much in evidence, it is true; he would perhaps better be described as a “person,” but he undou
btedly came under that general heading and was so classified in the court record. He was a small, somewhat shriveled, somewhat wrinkled American who had been living along for probably thirty-five years.

  His body looked as if it had been left by accident in his suit the last time it went to the tailor’s and pressed out with hot, heavy irons to its present sharpness. His face was merely a face. It was the kind of face that makes up crowds, gray in color with ears that shrank back against the head as if fearing the clamor of the city, and with the tired, tired eyes of one whose forebears have been underdogs for five thousand years.

  Brought into the dock between two towering Celts in executive blue he seemed like the representative of a long extinct race, a very fagged out and shriveled elf who had been caught poaching on a buttercup in Central Park.

  “What’s your name?”

  “Stuart.”

  “Stuart what?”

  “Charles David Stuart.”

  The clerk recorded it without comment in the book of little crimes and great mistakes.

  “Age?”

  “Thirty.”

  “Occupation?”

  “Night cashier.”

  The clerk paused and looked at the judge. The judge yawned.

  “Wha’s charge?” he asked.

  “The charge is” — the clerk looked down at the notation in his hand — “the charge is that he pushed a lady in the face.”

  “Pleads guilty?”

  “Yes.”

  The preliminaries were now disposed of. Charles David Stuart, looking very harmless and uneasy, was on trial for assault and battery.

  The evidence disclosed, rather to the judge’s surprise, that the lady whose face had been pushed was not the defendant’s wife.

  On the contrary the victim was an absolute stranger — the prisoner had never seen her before in his life. His reasons for the assault had been two: first, that she talked during a theatrical performance; and, second, that she kept joggling the back of his chair with her knees. When this had gone on for some time he had turned around and without any warning pushed her severely in the face.