Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald (Illustrated) (341 page)

She paused for a moment.

“Last night in bed I was thinking of the sort of man I really could love, but he’d be different from anybody I’ve ever met. He’d have to have certain things. He wouldn’t necessarily be very handsome, but pleasant looking; and with a good figure, and strong. Then he’d have to have some kind of position in the world, or else not care whether he had one or not; if you see what I mean. He’d have to be a leader, not just like everybody else. And dignified, but very pash, and with lots of experience, so I’d believe everything he said or thought was right. And every time I looked at him I’d have to get that thrill I sometimes get out of a new man; only with him I’d have to get it over and over every time I looked at him, all my life.”

“And you’d want him to be very much in love with you. That’s what I’d want first of all.”

“Of course,” said Josephine abstractedly, “but principally I’d want to be always sure of loving him. It’s much more fun to love someone than to be loved by someone.”

There were footsteps in the hall outside and a man walked into the room. He was an officer in the uniform of the French aviation--a glove-fitting tunic of horizon blue, and boots and belt that shone like mirrors in the lamplight. He was young, with gray eyes that seemed to be looking off into the distance, and a red-brown military mustache. Across his left breast was a line of colored ribbons, and there were gold-embroidered stripes on his arms and wings on his collar.

“Good evening,” he said courteously. “I was directed in here. I hope I’m not breaking into something.”

Josephine did not move; from head to foot she saw him, and as she watched he seemed to come nearer, filling her whole vision. She heard Lillian’s voice, and then the officer’s voice, saying:

“My name’s Dicer; I’m Christine’s cousin. Do you mind if I smoke a cigarette?”

He didn’t sit down. He moved about the room and turned over a magazine, not oblivious to their presence, but as if respecting their conversation. But when he saw that silence had fallen, he sat against a table near them with his arms folded and smiled at them.

“You’re in the French army,” Lillian ventured.

“Yes, I’ve just got back, and very glad to be here.”

He didn’t look glad, Josephine noticed. He looked as if he wanted to get out now, but had no place to go to.

For the first time in her life she felt no confidence. She had absolutely nothing to say. She hoped the emptiness that she had felt ever since her soul poured suddenly out toward his beautiful image didn’t show in her face. She made her lips into a smile, and kept thinking how once, long ago, Travis de Coppet had worn his uncle’s opera cloak to dancing school and suddenly seemed like a man out of the great world. So, now, the war overseas had gone on so long, touched us so little, save for confining us to our own shores, that it had a legendary quality about it, and the figure before her seemed to have stepped out of a gigantic red fairy tale.

She was glad when the other dinner guests came and the room filled with people, strangers she could talk to or laugh with or yawn at, according to their deserts. She despised the girls fluttering around Captain Dicer, but she admired him for not showing by a flicker of his eye that he either enjoyed it or hated it. Especially she disliked a tall, possessive blonde who once passed, her hand on his arm; he should have flicked away with a handkerchief the contamination of his immaculateness.

They went in to dinner; he was far away from her, and she was glad. All she could see of him was his blue cuff farther up the table when he reached for a glass, but she felt that they were alone together, none the less because he did not know.

The man next to her gave her the superfluous information that he was a hero:

“He’s Christine’s cousin, brought up in France, and joined at the beginning of the war. He was shot down behind the German lines and escaped by jumping off a train. There was a lot about it in the papers. I think he’s over here on some kind of propaganda work. . . . Great horseman too. Everybody likes him.”

After dinner she sat quietly while two men talked over her, sat persistently willing him to come to her. Ah, but she would be so nice, avoiding any curiosity or sentimentality about his experiences, avoiding any of the things that must have bored and embarrassed him since he had been home. She heard the voices around him:

“Captain Dicer. . . . Germans crucify all the Canadian soldiers they capture. . . . How much longer do you think the war . . . to be behind the enemy lines. . . . Were you frightened?” And then a heavy, male voice telling him about it, between puffs of a cigar: “The way I see it, Captain Dicer, neither side is getting anywhere. It strikes me they’re afraid of each other.”

It seemed a long time later that he came over to her, but at just the right moment, when there was a vacant seat beside her and he could slip into it.

“I wanted to talk to the prettiest girl for a while. I’ve wanted to all evening; it’s been pretty heavy going.”

Josephine wanted to lean against the shining leather of his belt, and more, she wanted to take his head in her lap. All her life had pointed toward this moment. She knew what he wanted, and gave it to him; not words, but a smile of warmth and delight--a smile that said, “I’m yours for the asking; I’m won.” It was not a smile that undervalued herself, because through its beauty it spoke for both of them, expressed all the potential joy that existed between them.

“Who are you?” he asked.

“I’m a girl.”

“I thought you were a flower. I wondered why they put you on a chair.”

“Vive la France,”
answered Josephine demurely. She dropped her eyes to his chest. “Do you collect stamps, too, or only coins?”

He laughed. “It’s good to meet an American girl again. I hoped they’d at least put me across from you at table, so I could rest my eyes on you.”

“I could see your cuff.”

“I could see your arm. At least--yes, I thought it was your green bracelet.”

Later he suggested: “Why couldn’t you come out with me one of these evenings?”

“It’s not done. I’m still in school.”

“Well, some afternoon then. I’d like to go to a tea-dance place and hear some new tunes. The newest thing I know is Waiting for the Robert E. Lee.”

“My nurse used to sing me to sleep with it.”

“When could you?”

“I’m afraid you’ll have to make up a party. Your aunt, Mrs. Dicer, is very strict.”

“I keep forgetting,” he agreed. “How old are you?”

“Eighteen,” she said, anticipating by a month.

That was the point at which they were interrupted and the evening ended for her. The other young men in dinner coats looked like people in mourning beside the banner of his uniform. Some of them were persistent about Josephine, but she was in a reverie of horizon blue and she wanted to be alone.

“This is it at last,” something whispered inside her.

Later that night and next day, she still moved in a trance. Another day more and she would see him--forty-eight hours, forty, thirty. The very word “blasé” made her laugh; she had never known such excitement, such expectation. The blessed day itself was a haze of magic music and softly lit winter rooms, of automobiles where her knee trembled against the top lacing of his boot. She was proud of the eyes that followed them when they danced; she was proud of him even when he was dancing with another girl.

“He may think I’m too young,” she thought anxiously. “That’s why he won’t say anything. If he did, I’d leave school; I’d run away with him tonight.”

School opened next day and Josephine wrote home:

DEAR MOTHER: I wonder if I can’t spend part of the vacation in New York. Christine Dicer wants me to stay a week with her, which would still leave me a full ten days in Chicago. One reason is that the Metropolitan is putting on Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen and if I come home right away I can only see the Rheingold. Also there are two evening dresses that aren’t finished--

The answer came by return post:

. . . because, in the first place, your eighteenth birthday falls then, and your father would feel very badly, because it would be the first birthday you hadn’t passed with us; and, in the second place, I’ve never met the Dicers; and, thirdly, I’ve planned a little dance for you and I need your help; and, lastly, I can’t believe that the reasons you give are your real ones. During Christmas week the Chicago Grand Opera Company is giving--

Meanwhile Capt. Edward Dicer had sent flowers and several formal little notes that sounded to her like translations from the French. She was self-conscious, answering them; so she did it in slang. His French education and his years in the war while America was whirling toward the Jazz Age had made him, though he was only twenty-three, seem of a more formal, more courteous generation than her own. She wondered what he would think of such limp exotics as Travis de Coppet, or Book Chaffee, or Louie Randall. Two days before vacation he wrote asking when her train left for the West. That was something, and for seventy-two hours she lived on it, unable to turn her attention to the masses of Christmas invitations and unheeded letters that she had meant to answer before leaving. But on the day itself, Lillian brought her a marked copy of Town Tattle that, from its ragged appearance, had already been passed around the school.

It is rumored that a certain Tuxedo papa who was somewhat irrasticable about the marital choice of a previous offspring views with equanimity the fact that his remaining daughter is so often in company with a young man fresh from his exploits in the French army.

Captain Dicer did not come to the train. He sent no flowers. Lillian, who loved Josephine like part of herself, wept in their compartment. Josephine comforted her, saying: “But listen, darling; it’s all the same to me. I didn’t have a chance, being in school like we were. It’s all right.” But she was awake hours and hours after Lillian was asleep.

III

Eighteen--it was to have meant so many things: When I’m eighteen I can--Until a girl’s eighteen--You’ll see things differently when you’re eighteen.

That, at least, was true. Josephine saw her vacation invitations as so many overdue bills. Abstractedly she counted them as she always had before--twenty-eight dances, nineteen dinner and theater parties, fifteen tea dances and receptions, a dozen luncheons, a few miscellaneous bids, ranging from early breakfast for the Yale Glee Club to a bob party at Lake Forest--seventy-eight in all, and with the small dance she was giving herself, seventy-nine. Seventy-nine promises of gayety, seventy-nine offers to share fun with her. Patiently she sat down, choosing and weighing, referring doubtful cases to her mother.

“You seem a little white and tired,” her mother said.

“I’m wasting away. I’ve been jilted.”

“That won’t worry you very long. I know my Josephine. Tonight at the Junior League german you’ll meet the most marvelous men.”

“No, I won’t, mother. The only hope for me is to get married. I’ll learn to love him and have his children and scratch his back--”

“Josephine!”

“I know two girls who married for love who told me they were supposed to scratch their husbands’ backs and send out the laundry. But I’ll go through with it, and the sooner the better.”

“Every girl feels like that sometimes,” said her mother cheerfully. “Before I was married I had three or four beaus, and I honestly liked each one of them as well as the others. Each one had certain qualities I liked, and I worried about it so long that it didn’t seem worth while; I might as well have counted eenie, meenie, mynie, mo. Then one day when I was feeling lonely your father came to take me driving, and from that day I never had a single doubt. Love isn’t like it is in books.”

“But it is,” said Josephine gloomily. “At least for me it always has been.”

For the first time it seemed to her more peaceful to be with a crowd than to be alone with a man. The beginning of a line wearied her; how many lines had she listened to in three years? New men were pointed out as exciting, were introduced, and she took pleasure in freezing them to unhappiness with languid answers and wandering glances. Ancient admirers looked favorably upon the metamorphosis, grateful for a little overdue time at last. Josephine was glad when the holiday drew to a close. Returning from a luncheon one gray afternoon, the day after New Year’s, she thought that for once it was nice to think she had nothing to do until dinner. Kicking off her overshoes in the hall, she found herself staring at something on the table that at first seemed a projection of her own imagination. It was a card fresh from a case--MR. EDWARD DICER.

Instantly the world jerked into life, spun around dizzily and came to rest on a new world. The hall where he must have stood throbbed with life; she pictured his straight figure against the open door, and thought how he must have stood with his hat and cane in hand. Outside the house, Chicago, permeated with his presence, pulsed with the old delight. She heard the phone ring in the downstairs lounge and, still in her fur coat, ran for it.

“Hello!”

“Miss Josephine, please.”

“Oh, hello!”

“Oh. This is Edward Dicer.”

“I saw your card.”

“I must have just missed you.”

What did the words matter when every word was winged and breathless?

“I’m only here for the day. Unfortunately, I’m tied up for dinner tonight with the people I’m visiting.”

“Can you come over now?”

“If you like.”

“Come right away.”

She rushed upstairs to change her dress, singing for the first time in weeks. She sang:

“Where’s my shoes?
   Where’s my new gray shoes, shoes, shoes?
I think I put them here,
   But I guess--oh, where the deuce--”

Dressed, she was at the head of the stairs when the bell rang.

“Never mind,” she called to the maid; “I’ll answer.”

She opened upon Mr. and Mrs. Warren Dillon. They were old friends and she hadn’t seen them before, this Christmas.

“Josephine! We came to meet Constance here, but we hoped we’d have a glimpse of you; but you’re rushing around so.”