In the light of four strong pocket flash lights, borne by four sailors in spotless white, a gentleman was shaving himself, standing clad only in athletic underwear upon the sand. Before his eyes an irreproachable valet held a silver mirror which gave back the soapy reflection of his face. To right and left stood two additional men-servants, one with a dinner coat and trousers hanging from his arm and the other bearing a white stiff shirt whose studs glistened in the glow of the electric lamps. There was not a sound except the dull scrape of the razor along its wielder’s face and the intermittent groaning sound that blew in out of the sea.
But it was not the bizarre nature of the ceremony, with its dim, weird surroundings under the unsteady light, that drew from the two women a short, involuntary sigh. It was the fact that the face in the mirror, the unshaven half of it, was terribly familiar, and in a moment they knew to whom that half face belonged — it was the countenance of their niece’s savage wooer who had lately prowled half naked along the beach.
Even as they looked he completed one side of his face, whereupon a valet stepped forward and with a scissors sheared off the exterior growth on the other, disclosing, in its entirety now, the symmetrical visage of a young, somewhat haggard but not unhandsome man. He lathered the bearded side, pulled the razor quickly over it and then applied a lotion to the whole surface, and inspected himself with considerable interest in the mirror. The sight seemed to please him, for he smiled. At a word one of the valets held forth the trousers in which he now incased his likely legs. Diving into his open shirt, he procured the collar, flipped a proper black bow with a practiced hand and slipped into the waiting dinner coat. After a transformation which had taken place before their very eyes, Aunt Cal and Aunt Jo found themselves gazing upon as immaculate and impeccable a young man as they had ever seen.
“Walters!” he said suddenly, in a clear, cultured voice.
One of the white-clad sailors stepped forward and saluted.
“You can take the boats back to the yacht. You ought to be able to find it all right by the foghorn.”
“Yes, sir.”
“When the fog lifts you’d better stand out to sea. Meanwhile, wireless New York to send down my car. It’s to call for me at the Marsden house on Montauk Point.”
As the sailor turned away, his torch flashed upward accidentally wavering upon the four amazed faces which were peering down at the curious scene.
“Look there, sir!” he exclaimed.
The four torches picked out the eavesdropping party at the top of the hill.
“Hands up, there!” cried Percy, pointing his rifle down into the glare of light.
“Miss Marsden!” called the young man eagerly. “I was just coming to call.”
“Don’t move!” shouted Percy; and then to the doctor, “Had I better fire?”
“Certainly not!” cried Doctor Gallup. “Young man, does your name happen to be what I think it is?”
The young man bowed politely.
“My name is George Van Tyne.”
A few minutes later the immaculate young man and two completely bewildered ladies were shaking hands. “I owe you more apologies than I can ever make,” he confessed, “for having sacrificed you to the strange whim of a young girl.”
“What whim?” demanded Aunt Cal.
“Why” — he hesitated — “you see, all my life I have devoted much attention to the so-called niceties of conduct; niceties of dress, of manners, of behavior — — “
He broke off apologetically.
“Go on,” commanded Aunt Cal.
“And your niece has too. She always considered herself rather a model of — of civilized behavior” — he flushed — “until she met me.”
“I see,” Doctor Gallup nodded. “She couldn’t bear to marry anyone who was more of a — shall we say, a dandy? — than herself.”
“Exactly,” said George Van Tyne, with a perfect eighteenth-century bow. “It was necessary to show her what a — what an — — “
“ — — unspeakable egg,” supplied Aunt Josephine.
“ — — what an unspeakable egg I could be. It was difficult, but not impossible. If you know what’s correct, you must necessarily know what’s incorrect; and my aim was to be as ferociously incorrect as possible. My one hope is that some day you’ll be able to forgive me for throwing the sand — I’m afraid that my impersonation ran away with me.”
A moment later they were all walking toward the house.
“But I still can’t believe that a gentleman could be so — so unspeakable,” gasped Aunt Jo. “And what will Fifi say?”
“Nothing,” answered Van Tyne cheerfully. “You see, Fifi knew about it all along. She even recognized me in the tree that first day. She begged me to — to desist until this afternoon; but I refused until she had kissed me tenderly, beard and all.”
Aunt Cal stopped suddenly.
“This is all very well, young man,” she said sternly; “but since you have so many sides to you, how do we know that in one of your off moments you aren’t the murderer who’s hiding out on the Point?”
“The murderer?” asked Van Tyne blankly. “What murderer?”
“Ah, I can explain that, Miss Marsden.” Doctor Gallup smiled apologetically. “As a matter of fact, there wasn’t any murderer.”
“No murderer?” Aunt Cal looked at him sharply.
“No, I invented the bank robbery and the escaped murderer and all. I was merely applying a form of strong medicine to your niece.”
Aunt Cal looked at him scornfully and turned to her sister. “All your modern ideas are not so successful as mah-jongg,” she remarked significantly.
The fog had blown back to sea, and as they came in sight of the house the lamps were glowing out into the darkness. On the porch waited an immaculate girl in a gleaming white dress, strung with beads which glistened in the new moonlight.
“The perfect man,” murmured Aunt Jo, flushing, “is, of course, he who will make any sacrifice.”
Van Tyne did not answer; he was engaged in removing some imperceptible flaw, less visible than a hair, from his elbow, and when he had finished he smiled. There was now not the faintest imperfection anywhere about him, except where the strong beating of his heart disturbed faintly the satin facing of his coat.
PRESUMPTION
Sitting by the window and staring out into the early autumn dusk, San Juan Chandler remembered only that Noel was coming tomorrow; but when, with a romantic sound that was half gasp, half sigh, he turned from the window, snapped on the light and looked at himself in the mirror, his expression became more materially complicated. He leaned closer. Delicacy balked at the abominable word “pimple”, but some such blemish had undoubtedly appeared on his cheek within the last hour, and now formed, with a pair from last week, a distressing constellation of three. Going into the bathroom adjoining his room — Juan had never possessed a bathroom to himself before — he opened a medicine closet, and, after peering about, carefully extracted a promising-looking jar of black ointment and covered each slight protuberance with a black gluey mound. Then, strangely dotted, he returned to the bedroom, put out the light and resumed his vigil over the shadowy garden.
He waited. That roof among the trees on the hill belonged to Noel Garneau’s house. She was coming back to it tomorrow; he would see her there… A loud clock on the staircase inside struck seven. Juan went to the glass and removed the ointment with a handkerchief. To his chagrin the spots were still there, even slightly irritated from the chemical sting of the remedy. That settled it — no more chocolate malted milks or eating between meals during his visit to Culpepper Bay. Taking the lid from the jar of talcum he had observed on the dressing table, he touched the laden puff to his cheek. Immediately his brows and lashes bloomed with snow and he coughed chokingly, observing that the triangle of humiliation was still observable upon his otherwise handsome face.
“Disgusting,” he muttered to himself. “I never saw anything so disgusting.” At twenty, such c
hildish phenomena should be behind him.
Downstairs three gongs, melodious and metallic, hummed and sang. He listened for a moment, fascinated. Then he wiped the powder from his face, ran a comb through his yellow hair and went down to dinner.
Dinner at Cousin Cora’s he had found embarrassing. She was so stiff and formal about things like that, and so familiar about Juan’s private affairs. The first night of his visit he had tried politely to pull out her chair and bumped into the maid; the second night he remembered the experience — but so did the maid, and Cousin Cora seated herself unassisted. At home Juan was accustomed to behave as he liked; like all children of deferent and indulgent mothers, he lacked both confidence and good manners. Tonight there were guests. “This is San Juan Chandler, my cousin’s son — Mrs Holyoke — and Mr. Holyoke.”
The phrase “my cousin’s son” seemed to explain him away, seemed to account for his being in Miss Chandler’s house: “You understand — we must have our poor relations with us occasionally.” But a tone which implied that would be rude — and certainly Cousin Cora, with all her social position, couldn’t be rude.
Mr and Mrs Holyoke acknowledged the introduction politely and coolly and dinner was served. The conversation, dictated by Cousin Cora, bored Juan. It was about the garden and about her father, for whom she lived and who was dying slowly and unwillingly upstairs. Towards the salad Juan was wedged into the conversation by a question from Mr Holyoke and a quick look from his cousin.
“I’m just staying for a week,” he answered politely; “then I’ve got to go home because college opens pretty soon.”
“Where are you at college?”
Juan named his college, adding almost apologetically, “You see, my father went there.”
He wished that he could have answered that he was at Yale or Princeton, where he wanted to go. He was prominent at Henderson and belonged to a good fraternity, but it annoyed him when people occasionally failed to recognize his alma mater’s name.
“I suppose you’ve met all the young people here,” supposed Mrs Holyoke “ — my daughter?”
“Oh, yes” — her daughter was the dumpy, ugly girl with the thick spectacles — “oh, yes.” And he added, “I knew some people who lived here before I came.”
“The little Garneau girl,” explained Cousin Cora.
“Oh, yes. Noel Garneau,” agreed Mrs Holyoke. “Her mother’s a great beauty. How old is Noel now? She must be — — “
“Seventeen,” supplied Juan; “but she’s old for her age.”
“Juan met her on a ranch last summer. They were on a ranch together. What is it that they call those ranches, Juan?”
“Dude ranches.”
“Dude ranches. Juan and another boy worked for their board.” Juan saw no reason why Cousin Cora should have supplied this information; she continued on an even more annoying note: “Noel’s mother sent her out there to keep her out of mischief, but Juan says the ranch was pretty gay itself.”
Mr Holyoke supplied a welcome change of subject.
“Your name is — — “ he inquired, smiling and curious.
“San Juan Chandler. My father was wounded in the battle of San Juan Hill and so they called me after it — like Kenesaw Mountain Landis.”
He had explained this so many times that the sentences rolled off automatically — in school he had been called Santy, in college he was Don.
“You must come to dinner while you’re here,” said Mrs Holyoke vaguely.
The conversation slipped away from him as he realized freshly, strongly, that Noel would arrive tomorrow. And she was coming because he was here. She had cut short a visit in the Adirondacks on receipt of his letter. Would she like him now — in this place that was so different from Montana? There was a spaciousness, an air of money and pleasure about Culpepper for which San Juan Chandler — a shy, handsome, spoiled, brilliant, Penniless boy from a small Ohio city — was unprepared. At home, where father was a retired clergyman, Juan went with the nice people. He didn’t realize until this visit to a fashionable New England resort that where there are enough rich families to form a self-sufficient and exclusive group, such a group is invariably formed. On the dude ranch they had all dressed alike; here his ready-made Prince of Wales suit seemed exaggerated in style, his hat correct only in theory — an imitation hat — his very ties only projections of the ineffable Platonic ties which were worn here at Culpepper Bay. Yet all the differences were so small that he was unable quite to discern them.
But from the morning three days ago when he had stepped off the train into a group of young people who were waiting at the station for some friend of their own, he had been uneasy; and Cousin Cora’s introductions, which seemed to foist him horribly upon whomever he was introduced to, did not lessen his discomfort. He thought mechanically that she was being kind, and considered himself lucky that her invitation had coincided with his wild desire to see Noel Garneau again. He did not realize that in three days he had come to hate Cousin Cora’s cold and snobbish patronage.
Noel’s fresh, adventurous voice on the telephone next morning made his own voice quiver with nervous happiness. She would call for him at two and they would spend the afternoon together. All morning he lay in the garden, trying unsuccessfully to renew his summer tan in the mild lemon light of the September sun, sitting up quickly whenever he heard the sound of Cousin Cora’s garden shears at the end of a neighbouring border. He was back in his room, still meddling desperately with the white powder puff, when Noel’s roadster stopped outside and she came up the front walk. Noel’s eyes were dark blue, almost violet, and her lips, Juan had often thought, were like very small, very soft, red cushions — only cushions sounded all wrong, for they were really the most delicate lips in the world. When she talked they parted to the shape of “Oo!” and her eyes opened wide as though she was torn between tears and laughter at the poignancy of what she was saying. Already, at seventeen, she knew that men hung on her words in a way that frightened her. To Juan her most indifferent remarks assumed a highly ponderable significance and begot an intensity in him — a fact which Noel had several times found somewhat of a strain. He ran downstairs, down the gravel path towards her. “Noel, my dear,” he wanted so much to say, “you are the loveliest thing — the loveliest thing. My heart turns over when I see your beautiful face and smell that sweet fresh smell you have around you.” That would have been the precious, the irreplaceable truth. Instead he faltered, “Why, hello, Noel! How are you?… Well, I certainly am glad. Well, is this your car? What kind is it? Well, you certainly look fine.”
And he couldn’t look at her, because when he did his face seemed to him to be working idiotically — like someone else’s face. He got in, they drove off and he made a mighty effort to compose himself; but as her hand left the steering wheel to fall lightly on his, a perverse instinct made him jerk his hand away. Noel perceived the embarrassment and was puzzled and — sorry.
They went to the tennis tournament at the Culpepper Club. He was so little aware of anything except Noel that later he told Cousin Cora they hadn’t seen the tennis, and believed it himself.
Afterwards they loitered about the grounds, stopped by innumerable people who welcomed Noel home. Two men made him uneasy — one a small handsome youth of his own age with shining brown eyes that were bright as the glass eyes of a stuffed owl; the other a tall, languid dandy of twenty-five who was introduced to her, Juan rightly deduced, at his own request.
When they were in a group of girls he was more comfortable. He was able to talk, because being with Noel gave him confidence before these others, and his confidence before the others made him more confident with Noel. The situation improved.
There was one girl, a sharp, pretty blonde named Holly Morgan, with . whom he had spent some facetiously sentimental hours the day before, and in order to show Noel that he had been able to take care of himself before her return he made a point of talking aside to Holly Morgan. Holly was not responsive. Juan was Noel’s prop
erty, and though Holly liked him, she did not like him nearly well enough to annoy Noel.
“What time do you want me for dinner, Noel?” she asked.
“Eight o’clock,” said Noel. “Billy Harper’ll call for you.”
Juan felt a twinge of disappointment. He had thought that he and Noel were to be alone for dinner; that afterwards they would have a long talk on the dark veranda and he would kiss her lips as he had upon that never-to-be-forgotten Montana night, and give her his DKE pin to wear. Perhaps the others would leave early — he had told Holly Morgan of his love for Noel; she should have sense enough to know.
At twilight Noel dropped him at Miss Chandler’s gate, lingered for a moment with the engine cut off. The promise of the evening — the first lights in the houses along the bay, the sound of a remote piano, the little coolness in the wind — swung them both up suddenly into that paradise which Juan, drunk with ecstasy and terror, had been unable to evoke.
“Are you glad to see me?” she whispered.
“Am I glad?” The words trembled on his tongue. Miserably he struggled to bend his emotion into a phrase, a look, a gesture, but his mind chilled at the thought that nothing, nothing, nothing could express what he felt in his heart.
“You embarrass me,” he said wretchedly. “I don’t know what to say.” Noel waited, attuned to what she expected, sympathetic, but too young quite to see that behind the mask of egotism, of moody childishness, which the intensity of Juan’s devotion compelled him to wear, there was a tremendous emotion.
“Don’t be embarrassed,” Noel said. She was listening to the music now a tune they had danced to in the Adirondacks. The wings of a trance folded about her and the inscrutable someone who waited always in the middle distance loomed down over her with passionate words and dark romantic eyes. Almost mechanically, she started the engine and slipped the gear into first.
Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald UK (Illustrated) Page 316