Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald (Illustrated) (344 page)

But first, as a sort of gateway to that deeper, richer life, there was Yale. The name evoked the memory of a heroic team backed up against its own impassable goal in the crisp November twilight, and later, of half a dozen immaculate noblemen with opera hats and canes standing at the Manhattan Hotel bar. And tangled up with its triumphs and rewards, its struggles and glories, the vision of the inevitable, incomparable girl.

Well, then, why not work his way through Yale? In a moment the idea had become a reality. He began walking rapidly up and down the room, declaring half aloud, “Of course, that’s the thing to do.” Rushing upstairs, he knocked at his mother’s door and announced in the inspired voice of a prophet: “Mother, I know what I’m going to do! I’m going to work my way through Yale.”

He sat down on her bed and she considered uncertainly. The men in her family had not been resourceful for several generations, and the idea startled her.

“It doesn’t seem to me you’re a boy who likes to work,” she said. “Besides, boys who work their way through college have scholarships and prizes, and you’ve never been much of a student.”

He was annoyed. He was ready for Yale a year ahead of his age and her reproach seemed unfair.

“What would you work at?” she said.

“Take care of furnaces,” said Basil promptly. “And shovel snow off sidewalks. I think they mostly do that--and tutor people. You could let me have as much money as it would take to go to the state university?”

“We’ll have to think it over.”

“Well, don’t you worry about anything,” he said emphatically, “because my earning my way through Yale will really make up for the money you’ve lost, almost.”

“Why don’t you start by finding something to do this summer?”

“I’ll get a job tomorrow. Maybe I can pile up enough so you won’t have to help me. Good night, Mother.”

Up in his room he paused only to thunder grimly to the mirror that he was going to work his way through Yale, and going to his bookcase, took down half a dozen dusty volumes of Horatio Alger, unopened for years. Then, much as a postwar young man might consult the George Washington Condensed Business Course, he sat at his desk and slowly began to turn the pages of Bound to Rise.

Two days later, after being insulted by the doorkeepers, office boys and telephone girls of the Press, the Evening News, the Socialist Gazette and a green scandal sheet called the Courier, and assured that no one wanted a reporter practically seventeen, after enduring every ignominy prepared for a young man in a free country trying to work his way through Yale, Basil Duke Lee, too “stuck-up” to apply to the parents of his friends, got a position with the railroad, through Eddie Parmelee, who lived across the way.

At 6.30 the following morning, carrying his lunch, and a new suit of overalls that had cost four dollars, he strode self-consciously into the Great Northern car shops. It was like entering a new school, except that no one showed any interest in him or asked him if he was going out for the team. He punched a time clock, which affected him strangely, and without even an admonition from the foreman to “go in and win,” was put to carrying boards for the top of a car.

Twelve o’clock arrived; nothing had happened. The sun was blazing hot and his hands and back were sore, but no real events had ruffled the dull surface of the morning. The president’s little daughter had not come by, dragged by a runaway horse; not even a superintendent had walked through the yard and singled him out with an approving eye. Undismayed, he toiled on--you couldn’t expect much the first morning.

He and Eddie Parmelee ate their lunches together. For several years Eddie had worked here in vacations; he was sending himself to the state university this fall. He shook his head doubtfully over the idea of Basil’s earning his way through Yale.

“Here’s what you ought to do,” he said: “You borrow two thousand dollars from your mother and buy twenty shares in Ware Plow and Tractor. Then go to a bank and borrow two thousand more with those shares for collateral, and with that two thousand buy twenty more shares. Then you sit on your back for a year, and after that you won’t have to think about earning your way through Yale.”

“I don’t think mother would give me two thousand dollars.”

“Well, anyhow, that’s what I’d do.”

If the morning had been uneventful, the afternoon was distinguished by an incident of some unpleasantness. Basil had risen a little, having been requested to mount to the top of a freight car and help nail the boards he had carried in the morning. He found that nailing nails into a board was more highly technical than nailing tacks into a wall, but he considered that he was progressing satisfactorily when an angry voice hailed him from below:

“Hey, you! Get up!”

He looked down. A foreman stood there, unpleasantly red in the face.

“Yes, you in the new suit. Get up!”

Basil looked about to see if someone was lying down, but the two sullen hunyaks seemed to be hard at work and it grew on him that he was indeed being addressed.

“I beg your pardon, sir,” he said.

“Get up on your knees or get out! What the h-- do you think this is?”

He had been sitting down as he nailed, and apparently the foreman thought that he was loafing. After another look at the foreman, he suppressed the explanation that he felt steadier sitting down and decided to just let it go. There were probably no railroad shops at Yale; yet, he remembered with a pang the ominous name, New York, New Haven and Hartford.

The third morning, just as he had become aware that his overalls were not where he had hung them in the shop, it was announced that all men of less than six months’ service were to be laid off. Basil received four dollars and lost his overalls. Learning that nails are driven from a kneeling position had cost him only carfare.

In a large old-fashioned house in the old section of the city lived Basil’s great-uncle, Benjamin Reilly, and there Basil presented himself that evening. It was a last resort--Benjamin Reilly and Basil’s grandfather were brothers and they had not spoken for twenty years.

He was received in the living room by the small, dumpy old man whose inscrutable face was hidden behind a white poodle beard. Behind him stood a woman of forty, his wife of six months, and her daughter, a girl of fifteen. Basil’s branch of the family had not been invited to the wedding, and he had never seen these two additions before.

“I thought I’d come down and see you, Uncle Ben,” he said with some embarrassment.

There was a certain amount of silence.

“Your mother well?” asked the old man.

“Oh, yes, thank you.”

Mr. Reilly waited. Mrs. Reilly spoke to her daughter, who threw a curious glance at Basil and reluctantly left the room. Her mother made the old man sit down.

Out of sheer embarrassment Basil came to the point. He wanted a summer job in the Reilly Wholesale Drug Company.

His uncle fidgeted for a minute and then replied that there were no positions open.

“Oh.”

“It might be different if you wanted a permanent place, but you say you want to go to Yale.” He said this with some irony of his own, and glanced at his wife.

“Why, yes,” said Basil. “That’s really why I want the job.”

“Your mother can’t afford to send you, eh?” The note of pleasure in his voice was unmistakable. “Spent all her money?”

“Oh, no,” answered Basil quickly. “She’s going to help me.”

To his surprise, aid came from an unpromising quarter. Mrs. Reilly suddenly bent and whispered in her husband’s ear, whereupon the old man nodded and said aloud:

“I’ll think about it, Basil. You go in there.”

And his wife repeated: “We’ll think about it. You go in the library with Rhoda while Mr. Reilly looks up and sees.”

The door of the library closed behind him and he was alone with Rhoda, a square-chinned, decided girl with fleshy white arms and a white dress that reminded Basil domestically of the lacy pants that blew among the laundry in the yard. Puzzled by his uncle’s change of front, he eyed her abstractedly for a moment.

“I guess you’re my cousin,” said Rhoda, closing her book, which he saw was The Little Colonel, Maid of Honor.

“Yes,” he admitted.

“I heard about you from somebody.” The implication was that her information was not flattering.

“From who?”

“A girl named Elaine Washmer.”

“Elaine Washmer!” His tone dismissed the name scornfully. “That girl!”

“She’s my best friend.” He made no reply. “She said you thought you were wonderful.”

Young people do not perceive at once that the giver of wounds is the enemy and the quoted tattle merely the arrow. His heart smoldered with wrath at Elaine Washmer.

“I don’t know many kids here,” said the girl, in a less aggressive key. “We’ve only been here six months. I never saw such a stuck-up bunch.”

“Oh, I don’t think so,” he protested. “Where did you live before?”

“Sioux City. All the kids have much more fun in Sioux City.”

Mrs. Reilly opened the door and called Basil back into the living room. The old man was again on his feet.

“Come down tomorrow morning and I’ll find you something,” he said.

“And why don’t you have dinner with us tomorrow night?” added Mrs. Reilly, with a cordiality wherein an adult might have detected disingenuous purpose.

“Why, thank you very much.”

His heart, buoyant with gratitude, had scarcely carried him out the door before Mrs. Reilly laughed shortly and called in her daughter.

“Now we’ll see if you don’t get around a little more,” she announced. “When was it you said they had those dances?”

“Thursdays at the College Club and Saturdays at the Lake Club,” said Rhoda promptly.

“Well, if this young man wants to hold the position your father has given him, you’ll go to them all the rest of the summer.”

Arbitrary groups formed by the hazards of money or geography may be sufficiently quarrelsome and dull, but for sheer unpleasantness the condition of young people who have been thrust together by a common unpopularity can be compared only with that of prisoners herded in a cell. In Basil’s eyes the guests at the little dinner the following night were a collection of cripples. Lewis and Hector Crum, dullard cousins who were tolerable only to each other; Sidney Rosen, rich but awful; ugly Mary Haupt, Elaine Washmer, and Betty Geer, who reminded Basil of a cruel parody they had once sung to the tune of Jungle Town:

Down below the hill
There lives a pill
That makes me ill,
   And her name is Betty Geer.
   We had better stop right here. . . .
She’s so fat,
She looks just like a cat,
And she’s the queen of pills.

Moreover, they resented Basil, who was presumed to be “stuck-up,” and walking home afterward, he felt dreary and vaguely exploited. Of course, he was grateful to Mrs. Reilly for her kindness, yet he couldn’t help wondering if a cleverer boy couldn’t have got out of taking Rhoda to the Lake Club next Saturday night. The proposal had caught him unaware; but when he was similarly trapped the following week, and the week after that, he began to realize the situation. It was a part of his job, and he accepted it grimly, unable, nevertheless, to understand how such a bad dancer and so unsociable a person should want to go where she was obviously a burden. “Why doesn’t she just sit at home and read a book,” he thought disgustedly, “or go away somewhere--or sew?”

It was one Saturday afternoon while he watched a tennis tournament and felt the unwelcome duty of the evening creep up on him, that he found himself suddenly fascinated by a girl’s face a few yards away. His heart leaped into his throat and the blood in his pulse beat with excitement; and then, when the crowd rose to go, he saw to his astonishment that he had been staring at a child ten years old. He looked away, oddly disappointed; after a moment he looked back again. The lovely, self-conscious face suggested a train of thought and sensation that he could not identify. As he passed on, forgoing a vague intention of discovering the child’s identity, there was beauty suddenly all around him in the afternoon; he could hear its unmistakable whisper, its never-inadequate, never-failing promise of happiness. “Tomorrow--one day soon now--this fall--maybe tonight.” Irresistibly compelled to express himself, he sat down and tried to write to a girl in New York. His words were stilted and the girl seemed cold and far away. The real image on his mind, the force that had propelled him into this state of yearning, was the face of the little girl seen that afternoon.

When he arrived with Rhoda Sinclair at the Lake Club that night, he immediately cast a quick look around to see what boys were present who were indebted to Rhoda or else within his own sphere of influence. This was just before cutting-in arrived, and ordinarily he was able to dispose of half a dozen dances in advance, but tonight an older crowd was in evidence and the situation was unpromising. However, as Rhoda emerged from the dressing room he saw Bill Kampf and thankfully bore down upon him.

“Hello, old boy,” he said, exuding personal good will. “How about dancing once with Rhoda tonight?”

“Can’t,” Bill answered briskly. “We’ve got people visiting us. Didn’t you know?”

“Well, why couldn’t we swap a dance anyhow?”

Bill looked at him in surprise.

“I thought you knew,” he exclaimed. “Erminie’s here. She’s been talking about you all afternoon.”

“Erminie Bibble!”

“Yes. And her father and mother and her kid sister. Got here this morning.”

Now, indeed, the emotion of two hours before bubbled up in Basil’s blood, but this time he knew why. It was the little sister of Erminie Gilbert Labouisse Bibble whose strangely familiar face had so attracted him. As his mind swung sharply back to a long afternoon on the Kampfs’ veranda at the lake, ages ago, a year ago, a real voice rang in his ear, “Basil!” and a sparkling little beauty of fifteen came up to him with a fine burst of hurry, taking his hand as though she was stepping into the circle of his arm.

“Basil, I’m so glad!” Her voice was husky with pleasure, though she was at the age when pleasure usually hides behind grins and mumbles. It was Basil who was awkward and embarrassed, despite the intention of his heart. He was a little relieved when Bill Kampf, more conscious of his lovely cousin than he had been a year ago, led her out on the floor.