Mrs. Grew’s conscience gives her periodic bad spells, and she frequently remarks to Mr. Grew that she simply must call up the Eddys and the Rinses and have them up to dinner. She even goes to the length of setting dates for the function. First, she will have them when the new hall runner is laid down; then it shall be after she has had her georgette-crêpe dress dyed henna; then as soon as Helga learns how to make decent gravy.
But the first thing you know there it is Thanksgiving, and hardly have they parked the last of the minced turkey before Christmas is upon them.
Mrs. Grew sends cards to the Eddys and the Rinses, and feels a lot better for it. She and Mr. Grew receive from Mr. and Mrs. Rinse the cunningest card with a picture of a little boy and a little girl kissing permanently under the mistletoe, and a highly engraved sheet stating that Mr. and Mrs. Waldemere Newins Eddy extend appropriate greetings.
Finally comes the day when Mrs. Eddy is in town for a smattering of shopping, and Mrs. Grew runs virtually smack into her, right out in broad daylight on Forty-second Street. Her first idea is to turn and run, but she dismisses that as impracticable. She approaches her friend apologetically, fearful that Mrs. Eddy has been so wounded by her neglect that the best she will draw is a cold nod.
But Mrs. Eddy is even at the moment writhing under like pangs of guilt. Both ladies cover their embarrassment with an almost hysterical cordiality, and rush into an embrace, crying in chorus, “My dear, I don’t know what you must think of me! I’ve been meaning and meaning to call you up, but I simply haven’t had a minute!”
Before they part, Mrs. Grew has got it over with, and the Eddys are pledged to come to dinner the very next week. Mrs. Grew also vows to get Mr. and Mrs. Rinse, so that our own crowd may be reunited in full.
When she telephones Mrs. Rinse, Mrs. Grew is not able to protest that she does not know what Mrs. Rinse must think of her before Mrs. Rinse herself has got off the line. It also comes out that Mrs. Rinse’s intention to get in touch with the rest of our own crowd has seldom been off her mind, but what with one thing and another she has absolutely not had a minute in which to go about it.
She cordially accepts the invitation to the reunion, declaring that it will be almost like being up at the Pebbly Point House once again.
But the trick to it is that it isn’t. Before her guests arrive on the big night, Mrs. Grew has a shivery presentiment that the party is going to be a complete dud. She even expresses to Mr. Grew her wish that it were over, which gets no argument out of him.
The fraternal spirit of our own crowd seems to go utterly democratic during the winter. The members, so bubbling with mirth and camaraderie on the porch, are curiously diffident and constrained in the Grews’ living room. The boys, in particular, have all the ease of manner of those wanted by the police. The ladies size up one another’s costumes with the cold and wary gaze suggestive of the mien of strange dogs meeting for the first time.
The crowd’s members even look odd to one another’s unaccustomed eyes. There is something strange, not to say bizarre, about Mrs. Eddy’s silhouette which never was apparent at the Pebbly Point House. There is something just a bit off about her dress, too, and it escapes the attention of neither of the other two ladies that she has evidently not yet got around to taking her jewels out of the safe-deposit vault. Mrs. Rinse, so fluffy and appealing amid rural surroundings, goes, somehow, a little sour in city clothes. The boys, so many glasses of fashion on the hotel porch, have a peculiar look about the collar and the line of the haircut.
Gathered at the dinner table, our own crowd cracks perceptibly under the strain of thinking up something to say. The boys ask one another with great heartiness if they have been getting any golf lately; but as none of them have, that closes that up tight. Mr. Grew tries out a few jokes here and there, but they cause scarcely a ripple. The ladies inquire brightly as to one another’s health during the time they have been separated; but that topic, even with Mrs. Rinse’s recent case of grippe, cannot be stretched out over more than twenty minutes. The snappiest they can do in the line of conversation is to give reports on the plays they have seen and agree on the distressing condition of the weather.
After dinner things go from bad to something terrible. Mr. Grew abandons all effort, and Mr. Eddy sits in impressive silence, breathing not a word of the business situation. Mr. Rinse, cajoled by his hostess, does render “Dinkelspiel at the Telephone” for old sake’s sake; but, away from the salt air, it seems to have lost its tang. Even he gets the idea, and does not give an encore.
Seeing that the party is about to sink into a decline, Mrs. Grew, in a desperate effort, brings out the album with the word “Snapshots” burned into its leather cover. It is crammed with photographs of interesting events at the Pebbly Point House, which ought to do much in the way of bringing up jolly reminiscences. There are those snapped on the beach, slightly groggy in effect owing to too bright a sun, of groups of toweled young ladies drying their hair and mounds of athletic young men stacked in human pyramids. There are the tennis-court groups, with the principal humorist looking cock-eyed at the camera through the mesh of his racquet. There are the views taken on that day when the spirit of carnival was rife, and the men dressed up in women’s clothes and took on the girls at baseball. There are close-ups of the man who has charge of the rowboats—there’s a character!—and of Mr. Armbruster holding aloft a freshly caught snapper, and of the winners in the water sports being presented by Mr. Blatch with suitably engraved silver eye cups.
The guests gather about the album and examine each snapshot dutifully. But when the photographs were taken each family of our own crowd had a set of prints made from the films, so any element of surprise is rather apt to be missing.
Eventually Mrs. Eddy glances at the clock and with an extravagant start of surprise declares they simply must run if they are to catch the 10:40. Mrs. Rinse also is overcome by the flight of time, and the only thing she can do about it is to make plans for immediate departure, explaining that if they don’t make the 10:17 they may have to wait twenty minutes for the next one. Mr. Rinse backs her up by remarking that that’s the way it is when you live on Long Island.
Mrs. Grew implores them not to think of going for hours to come, rising as she does so to lead the way to her bedroom for the ladies to get their wraps. It is there settled by Mrs. Eddy that our own crowd must get together the next week at her house. The news is passed on to the boys, who notably refrain from throwing their hats up in the air about it.
On their way to their trains Mrs. Eddy and Mrs. Rinse can find but sparing praise for the taste in which the Grews’ apartment is decorated, and they agree that the dessert at dinner was a sharp disappointment to them.
It is somewhat difficult to get Mr. Grew into the spirit of the thing on the day of the Eddys’ dinner, but he eventually listens to reason, and they embark for the Oranges in the evening. Our own crowd, they find, has not turned out in full force for the occasion. That afternoon Mrs. Rinse has telephoned that she is just about devastated at the incident, but an old school friend of hers, whom she hasn’t seen for she doesn’t know how many years, has dropped in to stay with her, and she cannot see any way out but for her and Mr. Rinse to forgo the reunion.
The evening whirls by almost exactly as did the one dedicated to the Grews’ festival, even to the poring over the collection of snapshots. The Grews tear themselves away in time to catch the 9:26 back to town, explaining that they have been up late so much recently. Mrs. Eddy prays them to stay over for another two or three trains, but she is, after all, fairly reasonable about taking no for an answer.
It is while they are waiting at the station that Mrs. Grew announces to her husband that before she’d let herself get as fat as Ethel Eddy she doesn’t know what she would do. Mr. Grew confines himself to asking, purely for the rhetorical effect, why the hell people who live in the suburbs think it’s any treat to you to tramp out there to dinner.
This fête does not entirely clean up our own crowd�
�s winter schedule. Still another get-together meet is held, this time at the Rinses’. But owing to the roughest kind of luck, the Grews find themselves unable to attend. Mrs. Grew telephones Mrs. Rinse the day before to tell, with a break in her voice, how a man has come on from Mr. Grew’s firm’s Chicago office, and they simply cannot get out of dining with him and his wife. The only thing that consoles her, she adds, is the confidence that Mrs. Rinse understands how those things are.
The crowd’s winter sessions having closed, things get pretty well back to normalcy again, and the days roll by until, as is no more than to be expected, summer comes around. Somehow, the crowd’s spirit of camaraderie seems to be closely tied up with the warm weather. Like the stirring of the sap, if you don’t mind something rather radical in the way of a simile, is the feeling of tender warmth for the Eddys and the Rinses that rises in the Grews with the first balmy days of June. As the time approaches for them to leave the city it seems as if they could hardly wait to get up to the Pebbly Point House and join up with the right set once again.
And our own crowd never disappoints, once it is established on the porch. Seen there, Mrs. Eddy again becomes a striking figure of a woman; Mrs. Rinse and Mrs. Grew hurry to tell her how simply great she looks with her face fuller. Mrs. Rinse is as frilled and as frolicsome as ever; her friends are amazed at the ladylike strides she has made in her singing. Mrs. Grew’s sports costumes are even more dashing; the other two ladies simply can’t say enough in favor of them.
Mr. Grew and Mr. Rinse resume their places as undisputed screams, and Mr. Eddy sprinkles words of hope about the future of the financial world.
Even at the first moment of the first meeting of the summer it is just as though the members of our own crowd had never been parted. They go right on with their badinage from where they left off, and it seems to go over bigger every season. Really, so close do they go as the summer dashes by that when the day after Labor Day arrives it doesn’t seem as if they could rip themselves apart.
Indeed, they probably couldn’t, and still live, if they did not hold tight to the annual thought of the practically countless times that they would get together during the winter.
The Saturday Evening Post, October 21, 1922
Professional Youth
If you want to take home to the folks some of the real inside stuff about this younger generation that has been breaking into the news so much lately, you owe it to yourself to start the thing off right by meeting Tommy Clegg. He is just the boy to come stealing down the winding staircase and let you in on the ground floor. For Tommy is one of the charter members of the Younger Generation, Inc.
Now, I shouldn’t want you to go away with the notion that Tommy is the boy who invented youth. He himself would laughingly deny it if you were to walk up to him on the street and ask him to tell you flatly, one way or the other, did he or didn’t he.
But he was well up in the van when it came to cashing in on the idea. Tommy and his little playmates don’t regard being young as just one of those things that are likely to happen to anybody. They make a business of it.
And Tommy Clegg did much to put the current younger generation on a business basis. He is in a practically perfect position to do some invaluable work in the way of getting the firm’s name before the public. As a sort of side line to his regular job of being just a kiddie, Tommy is engaged in giving literature a series of shoves in the right direction. It was but three or four short years ago that he first toddled to his little desk, seized his pen in his chubby fist and proceeded to knock American letters for a row of cloth-covered volumes of Louisa M. Alcott. And just take a look at him today—one of the leading boy authors, hailed alike by friends and relatives as the thirty-one-year-old child wonder.
Perhaps you have read his collected works, that celebrated five-inch shelf. As is no more than fair, his books—Annabelle Takes to Heroin, Gloria’s Neckings, and Suzanne Sobers Up—deal with the glamorous adventures of our young folks. Even if you haven’t read them, though, there is no need for you to go all hot and red with nervous embarrassment when you are presented to their author. Tommy will take care of all that for you. He has the nicest, most reassuring way of taking it all cozily for granted that not a man or a woman and but few children in these loosely United States could have missed a word that he has written. It grinds the ice practically to powder the moment you meet him.
HOW TOMMY PREPARES FOR EMERGENCIES
Probably you have it all worked out by this time that Tommy is not his official title. You seldom said a truer word. He signs his works in full—almost to repletion, in fact—Thomas Warmington Clegg, Junior.
But he wants all the world to think of him as just Tommy. He presses you to try to be a child again, along with him, and go ahead. He bucks you up by explaining that everybody calls him just Tommy—and when he says “everybody” you get a more than fair idea that it is no mere figure of speech. There is a largeness about it that hints pretty strongly to you that he includes such people as Gloria Swanson and Secretary Hughes and all the severely crowned heads of Europe. You have to fight hard to keep the tears back when you realize that there he is, urging you to string right along with the big boys and call him Tommy too.
But democratic—that’s Tommy all over. Scarcely 85 per cent of his success has gone to his head. He doesn’t take any more credit for what he has done than if he were Thackeray.
There is a pleasingly boyish sound about “Tommy” that makes it, really, more a trade-mark than a name. And Tommy Clegg, who has one of the best little business heads you ever saw in your life, isn’t the boy to overlook that. Youth, as we got to saying only about five minutes ago, is his dish. It was a rough day for him when he found it was no longer practicable for him to go about in rompers and carry a pail and shovel.
He can hardly keep from breaking down and taking a good laugh, he tells you, every time he thinks how funny it is for a child like him to be sending belles-lettres for a loop, the way he does. But you mustn’t think he takes it too personally. He simply sets it down as additional proof of what the present younger generation can do, once it gets into its stride. Perhaps at the moment you may not be able to recall ever having seen any pictures of Keats with a long white beard, either; but that, as Pat said to Mike while they were walking down the street one day, is neither here nor there. I’m not quite sure if it was Tommy that started it, but there seems to be a pretty persistent rumor going the rounds of our boys and girls that nothing was ever written prior to a couple of years ago.
You will find it rather uphill work, at first, to draw Tommy out about himself and his achievements. He may even wait to be introduced to you before he tells you, with an almost fanatical regard for detail, who he is, what he does and how much he gets for it. From there he will go on and show you a full line of samples, just so there will be no chance of your getting any wrong ideas about his work.
For Tommy never runs the risk of going out without taking along a few manuscripts; an author never knows, these days, when somebody is going to rush up to him in the Subway or on Forty-second Street or up at the Polo Grounds and ask him to give a reading. And it doesn’t do any harm to be prepared, so that he can start right off, the minute anybody drops a hat. In case of any tie he usually slips a couple of photographs in his pocket, too, for he might run into Jeritza or Queen Mary or Peggy Hopkins Joyce any time, on a ferry or at the movies, and there they would be, begging him for some little keepsake, and how would he feel if he had to confess that he had gone and left his photographs in his other clothes?
They are pretty striking, too, these pictures of Tommy. Taken in profile, they are, and so that there won’t be any confusion in the beholder’s mind he is shown holding a pen and bending musingly over a fair, broad sheet of paper—just as a barber, say, might be photographed dreamily regarding a razor and strop.
As special correspondent from the front line of the younger generation, Tommy naturally strives to give the public—his public, he calls it tender
ly—a good all-round view of the boys and girls. Sometimes his stories show them as clear-eyed young rebels—Tommy loves that one—facing life with sparkling eyes, their shining eyes undimmed by mists of sentiment and conventionality. He intimates pretty definitely that they are so many white hopes, and now that they have come along to take hold of things it’s going to be just the dandiest of all perfectly corking little worlds. Tommy uses these tales of his to get into circulation some of his more revolutionary ideas. It makes you stop and give a hearty gasp when you realize how daring is the viewpoint of these young ones of today. Looking facts squarely in the face isn’t the half of it. These clear-eyed heroes and heroines as good as come right out and say that there are two sexes, that youth is not apt to last a lifetime, that parents are occasionally slightly out of touch with the activities of their children, that spring is one of the pleasantest of the seasons and that there have been several known cases where love did not endure after the first forty or fifty years. It gives all the old theories rather a nasty shake-up, that’s what it does.
But startling as these stories are, there doesn’t seem to be any noticeable clamor for the moving-picture rights to them. As publicity for the younger set they are all very well, of course, as far as they go, but they don’t catch the out-of-town trade. There isn’t, as you might say, a headache in a barrelful of them.
THE GOINGS-ON OF THE YOUNGER SET
Tommy, who has his lighter side, too, is better able to show some of his real stuff when he writes, not of clear-eyed young rebels but of cock-eyed ones. There are few that can tie him when it comes to describing night life in the country clubs and the merry romps of the light-hearted girls and boys, so full of mischief and gin. You get the impression from these works that an evening with the younger generation is like something between a Roman bath and one of King Alphonso’s little vacations at Deauville. Rouge flows like water in Tommy’s pages, and cigarettes and cocktails circulate as freely as hard-boiled eggs at brookside picnics. Things, according to the author, look pretty black; he broadcasts the grim warning that conditions are getting no better rapidly and that decadence, as those outside the younger generation know of it, is still in its infancy.
Complete Stories Page 58