Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald (Illustrated) (261 page)

By and by they got into the motorboat and sat close together murmuring: “This fall--” “When you come to New Orleans--” “When I go to Yale year after next--” “When I come North to school--” “When I get back from Glacier Park--” “Kiss me once more.” . . . “You’re terrible. Do you know you’re terrible? . . . You’re absolutely terrible--”

The water lapped against the posts; sometimes the boat bumped gently on the pier; Basil undid one rope and pushed, so that they swung off and way from the pier, and became a little island in the night. . .

. . . next morning, while he packed his bag, she opened the door of his room and stood beside him. Her face shone with excitement; her dress was starched and white.

“Basil, listen! I have to tell you: Father was talking after breakfast and he told Uncle George that he’d never met such a nice, quiet, level-headed boy as you, and Cousin Bill’s got to tutor this month, so father asked Uncle George if he thought your family would let you go to Glacier Park with us for two weeks so I’d have some company.” They took hands and danced excitedly around the room. “Don’t say anything about it, because I reckon he’ll have to write your mother and everything. Basil, isn’t it wonderful?”

So when Basil left at eleven, there was no misery in their parting. Mr. Bibble, going into the village for a paper, was going to escort Basil to his train, and till the motor-car moved away the eyes of the two young people shone and there was a secret in their waving hands.

Basil sank back in the seat, replete with happiness. He relaxed--to have made a success of the visit was so nice. He loved her--he loved even her father sitting beside him, her father who was privileged to be so close to her, to fuddle himself at that smile.

Mr. Bibble lit a cigar. “Nice weather,” he said. “Nice climate up to the end of October.”

“Wonderful,” agreed Basil. “I miss October now that I go East to school.”

“Getting ready for college?”

“Yes, sir; getting ready for Yale.” A new pleasurable thought occurred to him. He hesitated, but he knew that Mr. Bibble, who liked him, would share his joy. “I took my preliminaries this spring and I just heard from them--I passed six out of seven.”

“Good for you!”

Again Basil hesitated, then he continued: “I got A in ancient history and B in English history and English A. And I got C in algebra A and Latin A and B. I failed French A.”

“Good!” said Mr. Bibble.

“I should have passed them all,” went on Basil, “but I didn’t study hard at first. I was the youngest boy in my class and I had a sort of swelled head about it.”

It was well that Mr. Bibble should know he was taking no dullard to Glacier National Park. Mr. Bibble took a long puff of his cigar.

On second thought, Basil decided that his last remark didn’t have the right ring and he amended it a little.

“It wasn’t exactly a swelled head, but I never had to study very much, because in English I’d usually read most of the books before, and in history I’d read a lot too.” He broke off and tried again: “I mean, when you say swelled head you think of a boy just going around with his head swelled, sort of, saying, ‘Oh, look how much I know!’ Well, I wasn’t like that. I mean, I didn’t think I knew everything, but I was sort of--”

As he searched for the elusive word, Mr. Bibble said, “H’m!” and pointed with his cigar at a spot in the lake.

“There’s a boat,” he said.

“Yes,” agreed Basil. “I don’t know much about sailing. I never cared for it. Of course I’ve been out a lot, just tending boards and all that, but most of the time you have to sit with nothing to do. I like football.”

“H’m!” said Mr. Bibble. “When I was your age I was out in the Gulf in a catboat every day.”

“I guess it’s fun if you like it,” conceded Basil.

“Happiest days of my life.”

The station was in sight. It occurred to Basil that he should make one final friendly gesture.

“Your daughter certainly is an attractive girl, Mr. Bibble,” he said. “I usually get along with girls all right, but I don’t usually like them very much. But I think your daughter is the most attractive girl I ever met.” Then, as the car stopped, a faint misgiving overtook him and he was impelled to add with a disparaging little laugh. “Good-by. I hope I didn’t talk too much.”

“Not at all,” said Mr. Bibble. “Good luck to you. Goo’-by.”

A few minutes later, when Basil’s train had pulled out, Mr. Bibble stood at the newsstand buying a paper and already drying his forehead against the hot July day.

“Yes, sir! That was a lesson not to do anything in a hurry,” he was saying to himself vehemently. “Imagine listening to that fresh kid gabbling about himself all through Glacier Park! Thank the good Lord for that little ride!”

On his arrival home, Basil literally sat down and waited. Under no pretext would he leave the house save for short trips to the drug store for refreshments, whence he returned on a full run. The sound of the telephone or the door-bell galvanized him into the rigidity of the electric chair.

That afternoon he composed a wondrous geographical poem, which he mailed to Minnie:

Of all the fair flowers of Paris,
   Of all the red roses of Rome,
Of all the deep tears of Vienna
   The sadness wherever you roam,
I think of that night by the lakeside,
   The beam of the moon and stars,
And the smell of an aching like perfume,
   The tune of the Spanish guitars.

But Monday passed and most of Tuesday and no word came. Then, late in the afternoon of the second day, as he moved vaguely from room to room looking out of different windows into a barren lifeless street, Minnie called him on the phone.

“Yes?” His heart was beating wildly.

“Basil, we’re going this afternoon.”

“Going!” he repeated blankly.

“Oh, Basil, I’m so sorry. Father changed his mind about taking anybody West with us.”

“Oh!”

“I’m so sorry, Basil.”

“I probably couldn’t have gone.”

There was a moment’s silence. Feeling her presence over the wire, he could scarcely breathe, much less speak.

“Basil, can you hear me?”

“Yes.”

“We may come back this way. Anyhow, remember we’re going to meet this winter in New York.”

“Yes,” he said, and he added suddenly: “Perhaps we won’t ever meet again.”

“Of course we will. They’re calling me, Basil. I’ve got to go. Good-by.”

He sat down beside the telephone, wild with grief. The maid found him half an hour later bowed over the kitchen table. He knew what had happened as well as if Minnie had told him. He had made the same old error, undone the behavior of three days in half an hour. It would have been no consolation if it had occurred to him that it was just as well. Somewhere on the trip he would have let go and things might have been worse--though perhaps not so sad. His only thought now was that she was gone.

He lay on his bed, baffled, mistaken, miserable but not beaten. Time after time, the same vitality that had led his spirit to a scourging made him able to shake off the blood like water not to forget, but to carry his wounds with him to new disasters and new atonements--toward his unknown destiny.

Two days later his mother told him that on condition of his keeping the batteries on charge, and washing it once a week, his grandfather had consented to let him use the electric whenever it was idle in the afternoon. Two hours later he was out in it, gliding along Crest Avenue at the maximum speed permitted by the gears and trying to lean back as if it were a Stutz Bearcat. Imogene Bissel waved at him from in front of her house and he came to an uncertain stop.

“You’ve got a car!”

“It’s grandfather’s,” he said modestly. “I thought you were up on that party at the St. Croix.”

She shook her head. “Mother wouldn’t let me go--only a few girls went. There was a big accident over in Minneapolis and mother won’t even let me ride in a car unless there’s someone over eighteen driving.”

“Listen, Imogene, do you suppose your mother meant electrics?”

“Why, I never thought--I don’t know. I could go and see.”

“Tell your mother it won’t go over twelve miles an hour,” he called after her.

A minute later she ran joyfully down the walk. “I can go, Basil,” she cried. “Mother never heard of any wrecks in an electric. What’ll we do?”

“Anything,” he said in a reckless voice. “I didn’t mean that about this bus making only twelve miles an hour--it’ll make fifteen. Listen, let’s go down to Smith’s and have a claret lemonade.”

“Why, Basil Lee!”

THE CAPTURED SHADOW

Basil Duke Lee shut the front door behind him and turned on the dining-room light. His mother’s voice drifted sleepily downstairs:

“Basil, is that you?”

“No, mother, it’s a burglar.”

“It seems to me twelve o’clock is pretty late for a fifteen-year-old boy.”

“We went to Smith’s and had a soda.”

Whenever a new responsibility devolved upon Basil he was “a boy almost sixteen,” but when a privilege was in question, he was “a fifteen-year-old boy.”

There were footsteps above, and Mrs. Lee, in kimono, descended to the first landing.

“Did you and Riply enjoy the play?”

“Yes, very much.”

“What was it about?”

“Oh, it was just about this man. Just an ordinary play.”

“Didn’t it have a name?”

“‘Are You a Mason?’“

“Oh.” She hesitated, covetously watching his alert and eager face, holding him there. “Aren’t you coming to bed?”

“I’m going to get something to eat.”

“Something more?”

For a moment he didn’t answer. He stood in front of a glassed-in bookcase in the living room, examining its contents with an equally glazed eye.

“We’re going to get up a play,” he said suddenly. “I’m going to write it.”

“Well--that’ll be very nice. Please come to bed soon. You were up late last night, too, and you’ve got dark circles under your eyes.”

From the bookcase Basil presently extracted “Van Bibber and Others,” from which he read while he ate a large plate of straw softened with half a pint of cream. Back in the living room he sat for a few minutes at the piano, digesting, and meanwhile staring at the colored cover of a song from “The Midnight Sons.” It showed three men in evening clothes and opera hats sauntering jovially along Broadway against the blazing background of Times Square.

Basil would have denied incredulously the suggestion that that was currently his favorite work of art. But it was.

He went upstairs. From a drawer of his desk he took out a composition book and opened it.

BASIL DUKE LEE

ST.REGISSCHOOL
EASTCHESTER, CONN.
FIFTH FORM FRENCH

and on the next page, under Irregular Verbs:

Present

He turned over another page.

MR. WASHINGTON SQUARE

A Musical Comedy by

BASIL DUKE LEE

Music by Victor Herbert

ACT I

[
The porch of the Millionaires’ Club, near New York. Opening Chorus,
LEILIA and DEBUTANTES:

We sing not soft, we sing not loud
   For no one ever heard an opening chorus.
We are a very merry crowd
   But no one ever heard an opening chorus.
We’re just a crowd of debutantes
   As merry as can be
And nothing that there is could ever bore us
   We’re the wittiest ones, the prettiest ones.
In all society
   But no one ever heard an opening chorus.

LEILIA (
stepping forward
): Well, girls, has Mr. Washington Square been around here today?

Basil turned over a page. There was no answer to Leilia’s question. Instead in capitals was a brand-new heading:

HIC! HIC! HIC!

A Hilarious Farce in One Act

by

BASIL DUKE LEE

SCENE

[
A fashionable apartment near Broadway, New York City. It is almost midnight. As the curtain goes up there is a knocking at the door and a few minutes later it opens to admit a handsome man in a full evening dress and a companion. He has evidently been imbibing, for his words are thick, his nose is red, and he can hardly stand up. He turns up the light and comes down center.

STUYVESANT: Hic! Hic! Hic!

O’HARA (
his companion
): Begorra, you been sayin’ nothing else all this evening.

Basil turned over a page and then another, reading hurriedly, but not without interest.

PROFESSOR PUMPKIN: Now, if you are an educated man, as you claim, perhaps you can tell me the Latin word for “this.”

STUYVESANT: Hic! Hic! Hic!

PROFESSOR PUMPKIN: Correct. Very good indeed. I--

At this point Hic! Hic! Hic! came to an end in midsentence. On the following page, in just as determined a hand as if the last two works had not faltered by the way, was the heavily underlined beginning of another:

THE CAPTURED SHADOW

A Melodramatic Farce in Three Acts

by

BASIL DUKE LEE

SCENE

[
All three acts take place in the library of the
VAN BAKERS’
house in New York. It is well furnished with a red lamp on one side and some crossed spears and helmets and so on and a divan and a general air of an oriental den.

When the curtain rises
MISS SAUNDERS, LEILIA VAN BAKER
and
ESTELLA CARRAGE
are sitting at a table.
MISS SAUNDERS
is an old maid about forty very kittenish.
LEILIA
is pretty with dark hair.
ESTELLA
has light hair. They are a striking combination.