Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald (Illustrated) (190 page)

He sprang to his feet with clinched hands in a sort of triumph.

“Well, Bryan,” said Mr. Macy stepping through the portières.

The two older men smiled their half-smiles at him.

“Well Bryan,” said Mr. Macy again.

Dalyrimple smiled also.

“How do, Mr. Macy?”

He wondered if some telepathy between them had made this new appreciation possible — some invisible realization. . . .

Mr. Macy held out his hand.

“I’m glad we’re to be associated in this scheme — I’ve been for you all along — especially lately. I’m glad we’re to be on the same side of the fence.”

“I want to thank you, sir,” said Dalyrimple simply. He felt a whimsical moisture gathering back of his eyes.

The Four Fists

At the present time no one I know has the slightest desire to hit Samuel Meredith; possibly this is because a man over fifty is liable to be rather severely cracked at the impact of a hostile fist, but, for my part, I am inclined to think that all his hitable qualities have quite vanished. But it is certain that at various times in his life hitable qualities were in his face, as surely as kissable qualities have ever lurked in a girl’s lips.

I’m sure every one has met a man like that, been casually introduced, even made a friend of him, yet felt he was the sort who aroused passionate dislike — expressed by some in the involuntary clinching of fists, and in others by mutterings about “takin’ a poke” and “landin’ a swift smash in ee eye.” In the juxtaposition of Samuel Meredith’s features this quality was so strong that it influenced his entire life.

What was it? Not the shape, certainly, for he was a pleasant-looking man from earliest youth: broad-bowed with gray eyes that were frank and friendly. Yet I’ve heard him tell a room full of reporters angling for a “success” story that he’d be ashamed to tell them the truth that they wouldn’t believe it, that it wasn’t one story but four, that the public would not want to read about a man who had been walloped into prominence.

It all started at PhillipsAndoverAcademy when he was fourteen. He had been brought up on a diet of caviar and bell-boys’ legs in half the capitals of Europe, and it was pure luck that his mother had nervous prostration and had to delegate his education to less tender, less biassed hands.

At Andover he was given a roommate named Gilly Hood. Gilly was thirteen, undersized, and rather the school pet. From the September day when Mr. Meredith’s valet stowed Samuel’s clothing in the best bureau and asked, on departing, “hif there was hanything helse, Master Samuel?” Gilly cried out that the faculty had played him false. He felt like an irate frog in whose bowl has been put goldfish.

“Good gosh!” he complained to his sympathetic contemporaries, “he’s a damn stuck-up Willie. He said, ‘Are the crowd here gentlemen?’ and I said, ‘No, they’re boys,’ and he said age didn’t matter, and I said, ‘Who said it did?’ Let him get fresh with me, the ole pieface!”

For three weeks Gilly endured in silence young Samuel’s comments on the clothes and habits of Gilly’s personal friends, endured French phrases in conversation, endured a hundred half-feminine meannesses that show what a nervous mother can do to a boy, if she keeps close enough to him — then a storm broke in the aquarium.

Samuel was out. A crowd had gathered to hear Gilly be wrathful about his roommate’s latest sins.

“He said, ‘Oh, I don’t like the windows open at night,’ he said, ‘except only a little bit,’“ complained Gilly.

“Don’t let him boss you.”

“Boss me? You bet he won’t. I open those windows, I guess, but the darn fool won’t take turns shuttin’ ‘em in the morning.”

“Make him, Gilly, why don’t you?”

“I’m going to.” Gilly nodded his head in fierce agreement. “Don’t you worry. He needn’t think I’m any ole butler.”

“Le’s see you make him.”

At this point the darn fool entered in person and included the crowd in one of his irritating smiles. Two boys said, “‘Lo, Mer’dith”; the others gave him a chilly glance and went on talking to Gilly. But Samuel seemed unsatisfied.

“Would you mind not sitting on my bed?” he suggested politely to two of Gilly’s particulars who were perched very much at ease.

“Huh?”

“My bed. Can’t you understand English?”

This was adding insult to injury. There were several comments on the bed’s sanitary condition and the evidence within it of animal life.

“S’matter with your old bed?” demanded Gilly truculently.

“The bed’s all right, but —  — “

Gilly interrupted this sentence by rising and walking up to Samuel. He paused several inches away and eyed him fiercely.

“You an’ your crazy ole bed,” he began. “You an’ your crazy —  — “

“Go to it, Gilly,” murmured some one.

“Show the darn fool — “

Samuel returned the gaze coolly.

“Well,” he said finally, “it’s my bed — “

He got no further, for Gilly hauled off and hit him succinctly in the nose.

“Yea! Gilly!”

“Show the big bully!”

“Just let him touch you — he’ll see!”

The group closed in on them and for the first time in his life Samuel realized the insuperable inconvenience of being passionately detested. He gazed around helplessly at the glowering, violently hostile faces. He towered a head taller than his roommate, so if he hit back he’d be called a bully and have half a dozen more fights on his hands within five minutes; yet if he didn’t he was a coward. For a moment he stood there facing Gilly’s blazing eyes, and then, with a sudden choking sound, he forced his way through the ring and rushed from the room.

The month following bracketed the thirty most miserable days of his life. Every waking moment he was under the lashing tongues of his contemporaries; his habits and mannerisms became butts for intolerable witticisms and, of course, the sensitiveness of adolescence was a further thorn. He considered that he was a natural pariah; that the unpopularity at school would follow him through life. When he went home for the Christmas holidays he was so despondent that his father sent him to a nerve specialist. When he returned to Andover he arranged to arrive late so that he could be alone in the bus during the drive from station to school.

Of course when he had learned to keep his mouth shut every one promptly forgot all about him. The next autumn, with his realization that consideration for others was the discreet attitude, he made good use of the clean start given him by the shortness of boyhood memory. By the beginning of his senior year Samuel Meredith was one of the best-liked boys of his class — and no one was any stronger for him than his first friend and constant companion, Gilly Hood.

II

Samuel became the sort of college student who in the early nineties drove tandems and coaches and tallyhos between Princeton and Yale and New York City to show that they appreciated the social importance of football games. He believed passionately in good form — his choosing of gloves, his tying of ties, his holding of reins were imitated by impressionable freshmen. Outside of his own set he was considered rather a snob, but as his set was
the
set, it never worried him. He played football in the autumn, drank high-balls in the winter, and rowed in the spring. Samuel despised all those who were merely sportsmen without being gentlemen or merely gentlemen without being sportsmen.

He lived in New York and often brought home several of his friends for the week-end. Those were the days of the horse-car and in case of a crush it was, of course, the proper thing for any one of Samuel’s set to rise and deliver his seat to a standing lady with a formal bow. One night in Samuel’s junior year he boarded a car with two of his intimates. There were three vacant seats. When Samuel sat down he noticed a heavy-eyed laboring man sitting next to him who smelt objectionably of garlic, sagged slightly against Samuel and, spreading a little as a tired man will, took up quite too much room.

The car had gone several blocks when it stopped for a quartet of young girls, and, of course, the three men of the world sprang to their feet and proffered their seats with due observance of form. Unfortunately, the laborer, being unacquainted with the code of neckties and tallyhos, failed to follow their example, and one young lady was left at an embarrassed stance. Fourteen eyes glared reproachfully at the barbarian; seven lips curled slightly; but the object of scorn stared stolidly into the foreground in sturdy unconsciousness of his despicable conduct. Samuel was the most violently affected. He was humiliated that any male should so conduct himself. He spoke aloud.

“There’s a lady standing,” he said sternly.

That should have been quite enough, but the object of scorn only looked up blankly. The standing girl tittered and exchanged nervous glances with her companions. But Samuel was aroused.

“There’s a lady standing,” he repeated, rather raspingly. The man seemed to comprehend.

“I pay my fare,” he said quietly.

Samuel turned red and his hands clinched, but the conductor was looking their way, so at a warning nod from his friends he subsided into sullen gloom.

They reached their destination and left the car, but so did the laborer, who followed them, swinging his little pail. Seeing his chance, Samuel no longer resisted his aristocratic inclination. He turned around and, launching a full-featured, dime-novel sneer, made a loud remark about the right of the lower animals to ride with human beings.

In a half-second the workman had dropped his pail and let fly at him. Unprepared, Samuel took the blow neatly on the jaw and sprawled full length into the cobblestone gutter.

“Don’t laugh at me!” cried his assailant. “I been workin’ all day. I’m tired as hell!”

As he spoke the sudden anger died out of his eyes and the mask of weariness dropped again over his face. He turned and picked up his pail. Samuel’s friends took a quick step in his direction.

“Wait!” Samuel had risen slowly and was motioning back. Some time, somewhere, he had been struck like that before. Then he remembered — Gilly Hood. In the silence, as he dusted himself off, the whole scene in the room at Andover was before his eyes — and he knew intuitively that he had been wrong again. This man’s strength, his rest, was the protection of his family. He had more use for his seat in the street-car than any young girl.

“It’s all right,” said Samuel gruffly. “Don’t touch ‘him. I’ve been a damn fool.”

Of course it took more than an hour, or a week, for Samuel to rearrange his ideas on the essential importance of good form. At first he simply admitted that his wrongness had made him powerless — as it had made him powerless against Gilly — but eventually his mistake about the workman influenced his entire attitude. Snobbishness is, after all, merely good breeding grown dictatorial; so Samuel’s code remained but the necessity of imposing it upon others had faded out in a certain gutter. Within that year his class had somehow stopped referring to him as a snob.

III

After a few years Samuel’s university decided that it had shone long enough in the reflected glory of his neckties, so they declaimed to him in Latin, charged him ten dollars for the paper which proved him irretrievably educated, and sent him into the turmoil with much self-confidence, a few friends, and the proper assortment of harmless bad habits.

His family had by that time started back to shirt-sleeves, through a sudden decline in the sugar-market, and it had already unbuttoned its vest, so to speak, when Samuel went to work. His mind was that exquisite
tabula rasa
that a university education sometimes leaves, but he had both energy and influence, so he used his former ability as a dodging half-back in twisting through Wall Street crowds as runner for a bank.

His diversion was — women. There were half a dozen: two or three débutantes, an actress (in a minor way), a grass-widow, and one sentimental little brunette who was married and lived in a little house in Jersey City.

They had met on a ferry-boat. Samuel was crossing from New York on business (he had been working several years by this time) and he helped her look for a package that she had dropped in the crush.

“Do you come over often?” he inquired casually.

“Just to shop,” she said shyly. She had great brown eyes and the pathetic kind of little mouth. “I’ve only been married three months, and we find it cheaper to live over here.”

“Does he — does your husband like your being alone like this?”

She laughed, a cheery young laugh.

“Oh, dear me, no. We were to meet for dinner but I must have misunderstood the place. He’ll be awfully worried.”

“Well,” said Samuel disapprovingly, “he ought to be. If you’ll allow me I’ll see you home.”

She accepted his offer thankfully, so they took the cable-car together. When they walked up the path to her little house they saw a light there; her husband had arrived before her.

“He’s frightfully jealous,” she announced, laughingly apologetic.

“Very well,” answered Samuel, rather stiffly. “I’d better leave you here.”

She thanked him and, waving a good night, he left her.

That would have been quite all if they hadn’t met on Fifth Avenue one morning a week later. She started and blushed and seemed so glad to see him that they chatted like old friends. She was going to her dressmaker’s, eat lunch alone at Taine’s, shop all afternoon, and meet her husband on the ferry at five. Samuel told her that her husband was a very lucky man. She blushed again and scurried off.

Samuel whistled all the way back to his office, but about twelve o’clock he began to see that pathetic, appealing little mouth everywhere — and those brown eyes. He fidgeted when he looked at the clock; he thought of the grill down-stairs where he lunched and the heavy male conversation thereof, and opposed to that picture appeared another; a little table at Taine’s with the brown eyes and the mouth a few feet away. A few minutes before twelve-thirty he dashed on his hat and rushed for the cable-car.