Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald (Illustrated) (274 page)

‘It’s been wonderful meeting you,’ she told him. ‘I can’t tell you how many ideas I’ve gotten from what you said.’

‘But I haven’t any ideas.’

‘You have. All that about not getting engaged till the proper time comes. I haven’t had much opportunity to talk to a man like you. Otherwise my ideas would be different, I guess. I’ve just realized that I’ve been wrong about a lot of things. I used to want to be exciting. Now I want to help people.’

‘Yes,’ he agreed, ‘that’s very nice.’

He seemed about to say more when they arrived at the armoury. In their absence supper had begun; and crossing the great floor by his side, conscious of many eyes regarding them, Josephine wondered if people thought that they had been up to something.

‘We’re late,’ said Knowleton when Adele went off to put on the stockings. ‘The man you’re with has probably given you up long ago. You’d better let me get you something here.’

‘That would be too divine.’

Afterwards, back on the floor again, she moved in a sweet aura of abstraction. The followers of several departed belles merged with hers until now no girl on the floor was cut in on with such frequency. Even Miss Brereton’s nephew, Ernest Waterbury, danced with her in stiff approval. Danced? With a tentative change of pace she simply swung from man to man in a sort of hands-right-and-left around the floor. She felt a sudden need to relax, and as if in answer to her mood a new man was presented, a tall, sleek Southerner with a persuasive note:

‘You lovely creacha. I been strainin my eyes watchin your cameo face floatin round. You stand out above all these othuz like an Amehken Beauty Rose over a lot of field daisies.’

Dancing with him a second time, Josephine hearkened to his pleadings.

‘All right. Let’s go outside.’

‘It wasn’t outdaws I was considering,’ he explained as they left the floor. ‘I happen to have a mortgage on a nook right hee in the building.’

‘All right.’

Book Chaffee, of Alabama, led the way through the cloak-room, through a passage to an inconspicuous door.

‘This is the private apartment of my friend Sergeant Boone, instructa of the battery. He wanted to be particularly sure it’d be used as a nook tonight and not a readin room or anything like that.’

Opening the door he turned on a dim light; she came in and shut it behind her, and they faced each other.

‘Mighty sweet,’ he murmured. His tall face came down, his long arms wrapped around her tenderly, and very slowly so that their eyes met for quite a long time, he drew her up to him. Josephine kept thinking that she had never kissed a Southern boy before.

They started apart at the sudden sound of a key turning in the lock outside. Then there was a muffed snicker followed by retreating footsteps, and Book sprang for the door and wrenched at the handle just as Josephine noticed that this was not only Sergeant Boone’s parlour; it was his bedroom as well.

‘Who was it?’ she demanded. ‘Why did they lock us in?’

‘Some funny boy. I’d like to get my hands on him.’

‘Will he come back?’

Book sat down on the bed to think. ‘I couldn’t say. Don’t even know who it was. But if somebody on the committee came along it wouldn’t look too good, would it?’

Seeing her expression change, he came over and put his arm around her. ‘Don’t you worry, honey. We’ll fix it.’

She returned his kiss, briefly but without distraction. Then she broke away and went into the next apartment, which was hung with boots, uniform coats and various military equipment.

‘There’s a window up here,’ she said. It was high in the wall and had not been opened for a long time. Book mounted on a chair and forced it ajar.

‘About ten feet down,’ he reported, after a moment, ‘but there’s a big pile of snow just underneath. You might get a nasty fall and you’ll sure soak your shoes and stockin’s.’

‘We’ve got to get out,’ Josephine said sharply.

‘We’d better wait and give this funny man a chance--’

‘I won’t wait. I want to get out. Look--throw out all the blankets from the bed and I’ll jump on that: or you jump first and spread them over the pile of snow.’

After that it was merely exciting. Carefully Book Chaffee wiped the dust from the window to protect her dress; then they were struck silent by a footstep that approached--and passed the outer door. Book jumped, and she heard him kicking profanely as he waded out of the soft drift below. He spread the blankets. At the moment when Josephine swung her legs out the window, there was the sound of voices outside the door and the key turned again in the lock. She landed softly, reaching for his hand, and convulsed with laughter they ran and skidded down the half block towards the corner, and reaching the entrance to the armoury, they stood panting for a moment, breathing in the fresh night. Book was reluctant to go inside.

‘Why don’t you let me conduct you where you’re stayin? We can sit around and sort of recuperate.’

She hesitated, drawn towards him by the community of their late predicament; but something was calling her inside, as if the fulfilment of her elation awaited her there.

‘No,’ she decided.

As they went in she collided with a man in a great hurry, and looked up to recognize Dudley Knowleton.

‘So sorry,’ he said. ‘Oh hello--’

‘Won’t you dance me over to my box?’ she begged him impulsively. ‘I’ve torn my dress.’

As they started off he said abstractedly: ‘The fact is, a little mischief has come up and the buck has been passed to me. I was going along to see about it.’

Her heart raced wildly and she felt the need of being another sort of person immediately.

‘I can’t tell you how much it’s meant meeting you. It would be wonderful to have one friend I could be serious with without being all mushy and sentimental. Would you mind if I wrote you a letter--I mean, would Adele mind?’

‘Lord, no!’ His smile had become utterly unfathomable to her. As they reached the box she thought of one more thing:

‘Is it true that the baseball team is training at Hot Springs during Easter?’

‘Yes. You going there?’

‘Yes. Good night, Mr Knowleton.’

But she was destined to see him once more. It was outside the men’s coat room, where she waited among a crowd of other pale survivors and their paler mothers, whose wrinkles had doubled and tripled with the passing night. He was explaining something to Adele, and Josephine heard the phrase, ‘The door was locked, and the window open--’

Suddenly it occurred to Josephine that, meeting her coming in damp and breathless, he must have guessed at the truth--and Adele would doubtless confirm his suspicion. Once again the spectre of her old enemy, the plain and jealous girl, arose before her. Shutting her mouth tight together she turned away.

But they had seen her, and Adele called to her in her cheerful ringing voice:

‘Come say good night. You were so sweet about the stockings. Here’s a girl you won’t find doing shoddy, silly things, Dudley.’ Impulsively she leaned and kissed Josephine on the cheek. ‘You’ll see I’m right, Dudley--next year she’ll be the most respected girl in school.’

III

As things go in the interminable days of early March, what happened next happened quickly. The annual senior dance at Miss Brereton’s school came on a night soaked through with spring, and all the junior girls lay awake listening to the sighing tunes from the gymnasium. Between the numbers, when boys up from New Haven and Princeton wandered about the grounds, cloistered glances looked down from dark open windows upon the vague figures.

Not Josephine, though she lay awake like the others. Such vicarious diversions had no place in the sober patterns she was spinning now from day to day; yet she might as well have been in the forefront of those who called down to the men and threw notes and entered into conversations, for destiny had suddenly turned against her and was spinning a dark web of its own.

Lit-tle lady, don’t be depressed and blue,
After all, we’re both in the same can-noo--

Dudley Knowleton was over in the gymnasium fifty yards away, but proximity to a man did not thrill her as it would have done a year ago--not, at least, in the same way. Life, she saw now, was a serious matter, and in the modest darkness a line of a novel ceaselessly recurred to her: ‘He is a man fit to be the father of my children’. What were the seductive graces, the fast lines of a hundred parlour snakes compared to such realities. One couldn’t go on forever kissing comparative strangers behind half-closed doors.

Under her pillow now were two letters, answers to her letters. They spoke in a bold round hand of the beginning of baseball practice; they were glad Josephine felt as she did about things; and the writer certainly looked forward to seeing her at Easter. Of all the letters she had ever received they were the most difficult from which to squeeze a single drop of heart’s blood--one couldn’t even read the ‘Yours’ of the subscription as ‘Your’--but Josephine knew them by heart. They were precious because he had taken the time to write them; they were eloquent in the very postage stamp because he used so few.

She was restless in her bed--the music had begun again in the gymnasium:

Oh, my love, I’ve waited so long for you,
Oh, my love, I’m singing this song for you--
    Oh-h-h--

From the next room there was light laughter, and then from below a male voice, and a long interchange of comic whispers. Josephine recognized Lillian’s laugh and the voices of two other girls. She could imagine them as they lay across the window in their nightgowns, their heads just showing from the open window. ‘Come right down,’ one boy kept saying. ‘Don’t be formal--come, just as you are.’

There was a sudden silence, then a quick crunching of footsteps on gravel, a suppressed snicker and a scurry, and the sharp, protesting groan of several beds in the next room and the banging of a door down the hall. Trouble for somebody, maybe. A few minutes later Josephine’s door half opened, she caught a glimpse of Miss Kwain against the dim corridor light, and then the door closed.

The next afternoon Josephine and four other girls, all of whom denied having breathed so much as a word into the night, were placed on probation. There was absolutely nothing to do about it. Miss Kwain had recognized their faces in the window and they were all from two rooms. It was an injustice, but it was nothing compared to what happened next. One week before Easter vacation the school motored off on a one-day trip to inspect a milk farm--all save the ones on probation. Miss Chambers, who sympathized with Josephine’s misfortune, enlisted her services in entertaining Mr Ernest Waterbury, who was spending a week-end with his aunt. This was only vaguely better than nothing, for Mr Waterbury was a very dull, very priggish young man. He was so dull and so priggish that the following morning Josephine was expelled from school.

It happened like this: they had strolled in the grounds, they had sat down at a garden table and had tea. Ernest Waterbury had expressed a desire to see something in the chapel, just a few minutes before his aunt’s car rolled up the drive. The chapel was reached by descending winding mock-medieval stairs; and, her shoes still wet from the garden, Josephine had slipped on the top step and fallen five feet directly into Mr Waterbury’s unwilling arms, where she lay helpless, convulsed with irresistible laughter. It was in this position that Miss Brereton and the visiting trustee had found them.

‘But I had nothing to do with it!’ declared the ungallant Mr Waterbury. Flustered and outraged, he was packed back to New Haven, and Miss Brereton, connecting this with last week’s sin, proceeded to lose her head. Josephine, humiliated and furious, lost hers, and Mr Perry, who happened to be in New York, arrived at the school the same night. At his passionate indignation, Miss Brereton collapsed and retracted, but the damage was done, and Josephine packed her trunk. Unexpectedly, monstrously, just as it had begun to mean something, her school life was over.

For the moment all her feelings were directed against Miss Brereton, and the only tears she shed at leaving were of anger and resentment. Riding with her father up to New York, she saw that while at first he had instinctively and whole-heartedly taken her part, he felt also a certain annoyance with her misfortune.

‘We’ll all survive,’ he said. ‘Unfortunately, even that old idiot Miss Brereton will survive. She ought to be running a reform school.’ He brooded for a moment. ‘Anyhow, your mother arrives tomorrow and you and she go down to Hot Springs as you planned.’

‘Hot Springs!’ Josephine cried, in a choked voice. ‘Oh, no!’

‘Why not?’ he demanded in surprise. ‘It seems the best thing to do. Give it a chance to blow over before you go back to Chicago.’

‘I’d rather go to Chicago,’ said Josephine breathlessly. ‘Daddy, I’d much rather go to Chicago.’

‘That’s absurd. Your mother’s started East and the arrangements are all made. At Hot Springs you can get out and ride and play golf and forget that old she-devil--’

‘Isn’t there another place in the East we could go? There’s people I know going to Hot Springs who’ll know all about this, people that I don’t want to meet--girls from school.’

‘Now, Jo, you keep your chin up--this is one of those times. Sorry I said that about letting it blow over in Chicago; if we hadn’t made other plans we’d go back and face every old shrew and gossip in town right away. When anybody slinks off in a corner they think you’ve been up to something bad. If anybody says anything to you, you tell them the truth--what I said to Miss Brereton. You tell them she said you could come back and I damn well wouldn’t let you go back.’

‘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.