“They won’t believe it.”
There would be, at all events, four days of respite at Hot Springs before the vacations of the schools. Josephine passed this time taking golf lessons from a professional so newly arrived from Scotland that he surely knew nothing of her misadventure; she even went riding with a young man one afternoon, feeling almost at home with him after his admission that he had flunked out of Princeton in February — a confidence, however, which she did not reciprocate in kind. But in the evenings, despite the young man’s importunity, she stayed with her mother, feeling nearer to her than she ever had before.
But one afternoon in the lobby Josephine saw by the desk two dozen good-looking young men waiting by a stack of bat cases and bags, and knew that what she dreaded was at hand. She ran upstairs and with an invented headache dined there that night, but after dinner she walked restlessly around their apartment. She was ashamed not only of her situation but of her reaction to it. She had never felt any pity for the unpopular girls who skulked in dressing-rooms because they could attract no partners on the floor, or for girls who were outsiders at Lake Forest, and now she was like them — hiding miserably out of life. Alarmed lest already the change was written in her face, she paused in front of the mirror, fascinated as ever by what she found there.
“The darn fools!” she said aloud. And as she said it her chin went up and the faint cloud about her eyes lifted. The phrases of the myriad love letters she had received passed before her eyes; behind her, after all, was the reassurance of a hundred lost and pleading faces, of innumerable tender and pleading voices. Her pride flooded back into her till she could see the warm blood rushing up into her cheeks.
There was a knock at the door — it was the Princeton boy.
“How about slipping downstairs?” be proposed. “There’s a dance. It’s full of E-lies, the whole Yale baseball team. I’ll pick up one of them and introduce you and you’ll have a big time. How about it?”
“All right, but I don’t want to meet anybody. You’ll just have to dance with me all evening.”
“You know that suits me.”
She hurried into a new spring evening dress of the frailest fairy blue. In the excitement of seeing herself in it, it seemed as if she had shed the old skin of winter and emerged a shining chrysalis with no stain; and going downstairs her feet fell softly just off the beat of the musk from below. It was a tune from a play she had seen a week ago in New York, a tune with a future — ready for gaieties as yet unthought of, lovers not yet met. Dancing off, she was certain that life had innumerable beginnings. She had hardly gone ten steps when she was cut in upon by Dudley Knowleton.
“Why, Josephine!” He had never used her first name before — he stood holding her hand. “Why, I’m so glad to see you! I’ve been hoping and hoping you’d be here.”
She soared skyward on a rocket of surprise and delight. He was actually glad to see her — the expression on his face was obviously sincere. Could it be possible that he hadn’t heard?
“Adele wrote me you might be here. She wasn’t sure.”
— Then he knew and didn’t care; he liked her anyhow.
“I’m in sackcloth and ashes,” she said.
“Well, they’re very becoming to you.”
“You know what happened — “ she ventured.
“I do. I wasn’t going to say anything, but it’s generally agreed that Waterbury behaved like a fool — and it’s not going to be much help to him in the elections next month. Look — I want you to dance with some men who are just starving for a touch of beauty.”
Presently she was dancing with, it seemed to her, the entire team at once. Intermittently Dudley Knowleton cut back in, as well as the Princeton man, who was somewhat indignant at this unexpected competition. There were many girls from many schools in the room, but with an admirable team spirit the Yale men displayed a sharp prejudice in Josephine’s favour; already she was pointed out from the chairs along the wall.
But interiorly she was waiting for what was, coming, for the moment when she would walk with Dudley Knowleton into the warm, Southern night. It came naturally, just at the end of a number, and they strolled along an avenue of early-blooming lilacs and turned a corner and another corner…
“You were glad to see me, weren’t you?” Josephine said.
“Of course.”
“I was afraid at first. I was sorriest about what happened at school because of you. I’d been trying so hard to be different — because of you.”
“You mustn’t think of that school business any more. Everybody that matters knows you got a bad deal. Forget it and start over.”
“Yes,” she agreed tranquilly. She was happy. The breeze and the scent of lilacs — that was she, lovely and intangible; the rustic bench where they sat and the trees — that was he, rugged and strong beside her, protecting her.
“I’d thought so much of meeting you here,” she said after a minute. “You’d been so good for me, that I thought maybe in a different way I could be good for you — I mean I know ways of having a good time that you don’t know. For instance, we’ve certainly got to go horseback riding by moonlight some night. That’ll be fun.”
He didn’t answer.
“I can really be very nice when I like somebody — that’s really not often,” she interpolated hastily, “not seriously. But I mean when I do feel seriously that a boy and I are really friends I don’t believe in having a whole mob of other boys hanging around taking up time. I like to be with him all the time, all day and all evening, don’t you?”
He stirred a little on the bench; he leaned forward with his elbows on his knees, looking at his strong hands. Her gently modulated voice sank a note lower.
“When I like anyone I don’t even like dancing. It’s sweeter to be alone.”
Silence for a moment.
“Well, you know” — he hesitated, frowning — “as a matter of fact, I’m mixed up in a lot of engagements made some time ago with some people.” He floundered about unhappily. “In fact, I won’t even be at the hotel after tomorrow. I’ll be at the house of some people down the valley — a sort of house party. As a matter of fact, Adele’s getting here tomorrow.”
Absorbed in her own thoughts, she hardly heard him at first, but at the name she caught her breath sharply.
“We’re both to be at this house party while we’re here, and I imagine it’s more or less arranged what we’re going to do. Of course, in the daytime I’ll be here for baseball practice.”
“I see.” Her lips were quivering. “You won’t be — you’ll be with Adele.”
“I think that — more or less — I will. She’ll — want to see you, of course.”
Another silence while he twisted his big fingers and she helplessly imitated the gesture.
“You were just sorry for me,” she said. “You like Adele — much better.”
“Adele and I understand each other. She’s been more or less my ideal since we were children together.”
“And I’m not your kind of girl?” Josephine’s voice trembled with a sort of fright. “I suppose because I’ve kissed a lot of boys and got a reputation for speed and raised the deuce.”
“It isn’t that.”
“Yes, it is,” she declared passionately. “I’m just paying for things.” She stood up. “You’d better take me back inside so I can dance with the kind of boys that like me.”
She walked quickly down the path, tears of misery streaming from her eyes. He overtook her by the steps, but she only shook her head and said, “Excuse me for being so fresh. I’ll grow up — I got what was coming to me — it’s all right.”
A little later when she looked around the floor for him he had gone — and Josephine realized with a shock that for the first time in her life, she had tried for a man and failed. But, save in the very young, only love begets love, and from the moment Josephine had perceived that his interest in her was merely kindness she realized the wound was not in her heart but in her pride.
She would forget him quickly, but she would never forget what she had learned from him. There were two kinds of men, those you played with and those you might marry. And as this passed through her mind, her restless eyes wandered casually, over the group of stags, resting very lightly on Mr Gordon Tinsley, the current catch of Chicago, reputedly the richest young man in the Middle West. He had never paid any attention to young Josephine until tonight. Ten minutes ago he had asked her to go driving with him tomorrow.
But he did not attract her — and she decided to refuse. One mustn’t run through people, and, for the sake of a romantic half-hour, trade a possibility that might develop — quite seriously — later, at the proper time. She did not know that this was the first mature thought that she had ever had in her life, but it was.
The orchestra were packing their instruments and the Princeton man was still at her ear, still imploring her to walk out with him into the night. Josephine knew without cogitation which sort of man he was — and the moon was bright even on the windows. So with a certain sense of relaxation she took his arm and they strolled out to the pleasant bower she had so lately quitted, and their faces turned towards each other, like little moons under the great white ones which hovered high over the Blue Ridge; his arm dropped softly about her yielding shoulder.
“Well?” he whispered.
“Well.”
TOO CUTE FOR WORDS,
Bryan didn’t know exactly why Mrs. Hannaman was there. He thought it was something about his being a widower who should be looked after in some way. He had come home early from his office to catch up on certain aspects of his daughter.
“She has such beautiful manners,” Mrs. Hannaman was saying. “Old-fashioned manners.”
“Thank you,” he said. “We brought up Gwen in the Continental style, and when we came back here, we tried to keep up the general idea.”
“You taught her languages, and all that?”
“Lord, no! I never learned anything but waiter’s French, but I’m strict with Gwen. I don’t let her go to the movies, for instance — — “
Had Mrs. Hannaman’s memory betrayed her, or had she heard her little niece Clara say that she and Gwen sat through three straight performances of Top Hat, and would see it again if they could find it at one of the smaller theaters.
“We have a phonograph,” Bryan Bowers continued, “so Gwen can play music of her own choice, but I won’t give her a radio. Children ought to make their own music.”
He heard himself saying this, only half believing it, wishing Gwen would come home.
“She plays the piano?”
“Well, she did. She took piano lessons for years, but this year there was so much work at school that we just let it go. I mean we postponed it. She’s just thirteen, and she’s got plenty of time.”
“Of course,” agreed Mrs. Hannaman dryly.
When Mrs. Hannaman left, Bryan went back to work on the apartment. They were really settled at last. At least he was settled; it seemed rather likely that Gwen never would be settled. Glancing into his daughter’s room now, he uttered a short exclamation of despair. Everything was just as it had been for the past three weeks. He had told the maid that nothing must be touched except the bed, because Gwen should do her own straightening up. She had been to camp this past summer; if this was the system she had learned, that was time wasted. A pair of crushed jodhpur breeches lay in the corner where they had been stepped out of, a section of them rising resentfully above the rest, as if trying to straighten up of its own accord; a stack of letters from boys — a stack that had once worn a neat elastic band — was spread along the top of the bureau like a pack of cards ready for the draw; three knitted sweaters in various preliminary stages of creation and the beginnings of many tidying-ups lay like abandoned foundations about the room. The business was always to be completed on the following Sunday, but Sunday was always the day when the unforeseen came up: Gwen was invited to do something very healthy, or she had so much homework, or he had to take her out with him because he didn’t want to leave her alone. For a while it had been a fine idea to let her live in this mess until she was impelled to act from within, but as October crept into November the confusion increased. She was late for everything because nothing could be found. The maid complained it had become absolutely impossible to sweep the room, save with the cautious steps of Eliza on the ice.
He heard his daughter come in, and, with the problem in his mind, went to meet her in the living room.
They faced each other in a moment of happiness. They looked alike. He had been handsome once, but middle age had added flesh in the unappealing places. When he spoke of the past, Gwen was never able to imagine him in romantic situations. She was an arresting little beauty, black-eyed, with soft bay hair and with an extraordinarily infectious laugh — a rare laugh that had a peal in it, and yet managed not to get on people’s nerves.
She had thrown herself full length on a couch, scattering her books on the floor. When Bryan came in, she moved her feet so that they just projected over the side of the couch. He noted the gesture, and suggested:
“Pull down your skirt or else take it off altogether.”
“Daddy! Don’t be so vulgar!”
“That’s the only way I can get through to you sometimes.”
“Daddy, I got credit plus in geometry. Cute?”
“What’s credit plus?”
“Ninety-two.”
“Why don’t they just say ninety-two?”
“Daddy, did you get the tickets for the Harvard game?”
“I told you I’d take you.”
She nodded, and remarked as if absently:
“Dizzy’s father’s taking her to the Harvard game and the Navy game. And her uncle’s taking her to the Dartmouth game. Isn’t that cute?”
“What’s cute about it? Do you know what you said to Doctor Parker the other day, when he asked you if you liked Caesar? You said you thought Caesar was cute.” He walked around the room in helpless laughter. “A man conquers the whole known world, and a little schoolgirl comes along a thousand years afterwards and says he’s cute!”
“Two thousand years,” remarked Gwen, unruffled… “Daddy, Mr. Campbell’s driving them up to the Harvard game in their new car. Isn’t that cu — isn’t that fine?”
She was always like this in the first half hour home from school or a party — outer worlds where she lived with such intensity that she carried it into the slower tempo of life at home like weather on her shoes. This is what made her say:
“It’d take forever the way you drive, daddy.”
“I drive fast enough.”
“Once I drove ninety miles an hour — — “
Startled, he stared at her, and Gwen should have been acute enough to minimize the statement immediately. But still in her worldly daze, she continued “ — on the way to Turtle Lake this summer.”
“Who with?”
“With a girl.”
“A girl your age driving a car!”
“No. The girl was nineteen — she’s a sister of a girl I was visiting. But I won’t tell you who. Probably you’d never let me go there again, daddy.”
She was very sorry that she had ever spoken.
“You might as well tell me. I know who you’ve visited this summer and I can find out who’s got a sister nineteen years old. I’m not going to have you mangled up against a telegraph post because some young — — “
Momentarily Gwen was saved by the maid calling her father to the phone. As a sort of propitiation, she hung her overcoat in the closet, picked up her books and went on into her own room.
She examined it, as usual, with a vast surprise. She knew it was rather terrible, but she had some system of her own as to what to do about it — a system that never seemed to work out in actuality. She pounced with a cry upon the wastebasket — it was her record of “Cheek to Cheek,” broken, but preserved to remind her to get another. She cradled it to her arms, and as if this, in turn, reminded her of something
else, she decided to telephone Dizzy Campbell. This required a certain diplomacy. Bryan had become adamant on the matter of long phone conversations.
“This is about Latin,” she assured him.
“All right, but make it short, daughter.”
He read the paper in the living room, waiting for supper; for some time he had been aware of a prolonged murmur which confused itself in his mind with distant guns in Ethiopia and China. Only when he turned to the financial page and read the day’s quotation on American Tel. and Tel. did he spring to his feet.
“She’s on the phone again!” he exclaimed to himself; but even as the paper billowed to rest in front of him, Gwen appeared, all radiant and on the run.
“Oh, daddy, the best thing! You won’t have to take me to the game, after all! I mean you will to the game, but not up to the game. Dizzy’s aunt, Mrs. Charles Wrotten Ray, or something like that — somebody that’s all right, that they know about, that they can trust, and all that sort of thing — — “
While she panted, he inquired politely:
“What about her? Has she made the Princeton team?”
“No. She lives up there and she has some nephews or uncles or something — it was all kind of complicated on the phone — that go to some kind of prep school that are about our age — about fifteen or sixteen — — “
“I thought you were thirteen.”
“The boy is always older,” she assured him. “Anyhow, she — — “
“Don’t ever say ‘she.’“
“Well, excuse me, daddy. Well, anyhow, this sort of person — you know, not ‘she,’ but this sort of Mrs. Wrotten Ray, or whatever her name is — she wants Dizzy — — “
“Now, calm yourself, calm yourself.”
“I can’t, daddy; she’s waiting on the phone.”
“Who? Mrs. Wrotten Ray?”
“Oh, that isn’t her name, but it’s something like that. Anyhow, Mrs. Wrotten Ray wants Dizzy to bring Clara Hannaman and one other girl up to a little dance the night before the game. And Dizzy wants me to be the other girl, and can I go?”
Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald UK (Illustrated) Page 335