Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald (Illustrated) (416 page)

“Certainly.”

She hesitated. Something was wrong and she hated to leave him. He helped her out of the taxi and paid it.

“Come with us?” she asked almost anxiously. “Listen, if you like —  — “

“I’m going to walk for a while!”

She caught sight of the men waiting for her and waved to them.

“George, is anything the matter?” she said.

“Of course not.”

He had never seemed so attractive, so desirable to her. As her friends came up, two actors, looking like very little fish beside him, he took off his hat and said:

“Good night, I hope you enjoy the picture.”

“George —  — “

 — and a curious thing happened. Now for the first time she realized that her father was dead, that she was alone. She had thought of herself as being self-reliant, making more in some seasons than his practice brought him in five years. But he had always been behind her somewhere, his love had always been behind her — She had never been a waif, she had always had a place to go. And now she was alone, alone in the swirling indifferent crowd. Did she expect to love this man, who offered her so much, with the naive romantics of eighteen. He loved her — he loved her more than any one in the world loved her. She wasn’t ever going to be a great star, she knew that, and she had reached the time when a girl had to look out for herself. “Why, look,” she said, “I’ve got to go. Wait — or don’t wait.” Catching up her long gown she sped up Broadway. The crowd was enormous as theatre after theatre eddied out to the sidewalks. She sought for his silk hat as for a standard, but now there were many silk hats. She peered frantically into groups and crowds as she ran. An insolent voice called after her and again she shuddered with a sense of being unprotected. Reaching the corner she peered hopelessly into the tangled mass of the block ahead. But he had probably turned off Broadway so she darted left down the dimmer alley of Forty-eighth Street. Then she saw him, walking briskly, like a man leaving something behind — and overtook him at Sixth Avenue.

“George,” she cried.

He turned; his face looking at her was hard and miserable. “George, I didn’t want to go to that picture, I wanted you to make me not go. Why didn’t you ask me not to go?”

“I didn’t care whether you went or not.”

“Didn’t you?” she cried. “Don’t you care for me any more?”

“Do you want me to call you a cab?”

“No, I want to be with you.”

“I’m going home.”

“I’ll walk with you. What is it, George? What have I done?” They crossed Sixth Avenue and the street became darker. “What is it, George? Please tell me. If I did something wrong at your mother’s why didn’t you stop me?” He stopped suddenly. “You were our guest,” he said. “What did I do?”

“There’s no use going into it.” He signalled a passing taxi. “It’s quite obvious that we look at things differently. I was going to write you tomorrow but since you ask me it’s just as well to end it today.” “But why, George?” She wailed, “What did I do?” “You went out of your way to make a preposterous attack on an old gentlewoman who had given you nothing but courtesy and consideration.” “Oh, George, I didn’t, I didn’t… I’ll go to her and apologize. I’ll go tonight.”

“She wouldn’t understand. We simply look at things in different ways.”

“Oh — h-h.” She stood aghast.

He started to say something further, but after a glance at her he opened the taxi door.

“It’s only two blocks. You’ll excuse me if I don’t go with you.”

She had turned and was clinging to the iron railing of a stair.

“I’ll go in a minute,” she said. “Don’t wait.”

She wasn’t acting now. She wanted to be dead. She was crying for her father, she told herself — not for him but for her father.

His footsteps moved off, stopped, hesitated — came back.

“Evelyn.”

His voice was close beside her.

“Oh, poor baby,” it said. He turned her about gently in his arms and she clung to him.

“Oh yes,” she cried in wild relief. “Poor baby — just your poor baby.” She didn’t know whether this was love or not but she knew with all her heart and soul that she wanted to crawl into his pocket and be safe for ever.

BETWEEN THREE AND FOUR

This happened nowadays, with everyone somewhat discouraged. A lot of less fortunate spirits cracked when money troubles came to be added to all the nervous troubles accumulated in the prosperity — neurosis being a privilege of people with a lot of extra money. And some cracked merely because it was in the air, or because they were used to the great, golden figure of plenty standing behind them, as the idea of prudence and glory stands behind the French, and the idea of “the thing to do” used to stand behind the English. Almost everyone cracked a little.

Howard Butler had never believed in anything, including himself, except the system, and had not believed in that with the intensity of men who were its products or its prophets. He was a quiet, introverted man, not at all brave or resilient and, except in one regard, with no particular harm in him. He thought a lot without much apparatus for thinking, and in normal circumstances one would not expect him to fly very high or sink very low. Nevertheless, he had a vision, which is the matter of this story.

Howard Butler stood in his office on the ninth floor of a building in New York, deciding something. It was a branch and a showroom of B. B. Eddington’s Sons, office furniture and supplies, of which he was a branch manager — a perfect office ceremoniously equipped throughout, though now a little empty because of the decreased personnel due to hard times. Miss Wiess had just telephoned the name of an unwelcome caller, and he was deciding whether he hadn’t just as well see the person now; it was a question of sooner or later. Mrs. Summer was to be shown in.

Mrs. Summer did not need to be shown in, since she had worked there for eight years, up until six months ago. She was a handsome and vital lady in her late forties, with golden-grayish hair, a stylish-stout figure with a reminiscent touch of the Gibson Girl bend to it, and fine young eyes of bright blue. To Howard Butler she was still as vivid a figure as when, as Sarah Belknap, she had declined to marry him nearly thirty years ago — with the essential difference that he hated her.

She came into his private office with an alert way she had and, in a clear, compelling voice that always affected him, said, “Hello, Howard,” as if, without especially liking him, she didn’t object to him at all. This time there was just a touch of strain in her manner.

“Hello, Sarah.”

“Well,” she breathed, “it’s very strange to be back here. Tell me you’ve got a place for me.”

He pursed his lips and shook his head. “Things don’t pick up.”

“H’m.” She nodded and blinked several times.

“Cancellations, bad debts — we’ve closed two branches and there’ve been more pay cuts since you left. I’ve had to take one.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t expect the salary I used to get. I realize how things are. But, literally, I can’t find anything. I thought, perhaps, there might be an opening, say as office manager or head stenographer, with full responsibility. I’d be very glad of fifty dollars a week.”

“We’re not paying anything like that.”

“Or forty-five. Or even forty. I had a chance at twenty-five when I first left here and, like an idiot, I let it go. It seemed absurd after what I’d been getting; I couldn’t keep Jack at Princeton on that. Of course, he’s partly earning his way, but even in the colleges the competition is pretty fierce now — so many boys need money. Anyhow, last week I went back and tried to get the job at twenty-five, and they just laughed at me.” Mrs. Summer smiled grimly, but with full control over herself; yet she could only hold the smile a minute and she talked on to conceal its disappearance: “I’ve been eating at the soup kitchens to save what little I’ve got left. When I think that a woman of my capacity —  — That’s not conceit, Howard; you know I’ve got capacity. Mr.

Eddington always thought so. I never quite understood —  — “

“It’s tough, Sarah,” he said quickly. He looked at her shoes — they were still good shoes — on top anyhow. She had always been well turned out.

“If I had left earlier, if I’d been let out before the worst times came, I could have placed myself; but when I started hunting, everyone had got panicky.”

“We had to let Muller go too.”

“Oh, you did,” she said, with interest; the news restored her a measure of self-respect.

“A week ago.”

Six months before, the choice had been between Mr. Muller and Mrs. Summer, and Sarah Summer knew, and Howard Butler knew that she knew, that he had made a ticklish decision. He had satisfied an old personal grudge by keeping Muller, who was a young man, clearly less competent and less useful to the firm than Mrs. Summer, and who received the same salary.

Now they stared at each other; she trying to fix on him, to pin him down, to budge him; he trying to avoid her, and succeeding, but only by retreating into recently hollowed out cavities in his soul, but safe cavities, from which he could even regard her plight with a certain satisfaction. Yet he was afraid of what he had done; he was trying to be hard, but in her actual presence the sophistries he had evolved did not help him.

“Howard, you’ve got to give me a job,” she broke out. “Anything — thirty dollars, twenty-five dollars. I’m desperate. I haven’t thirty dollars left. I’ve got to get Jack through this year — his junior year. He wants to be a doctor. He thinks he can hold out till June on his own, but someone drove him down to New York on Washington’s Birthday, and he saw the way I was living. I tried to lie to him, but he guessed, and now he says he’s going to quit and get a job. Howard, I’d rather be dead than stand in his way. I’ve been thinking of nothing else for a week. I’d be better dead. After all, I’ve had my life — and a lot of happiness.”

For an instant Butler wavered. It could be done, but the phrase “a lot of happiness” hardened him, and he told himself how her presence in the office now would be a continual reproach.

Thirty years ago, on the porch of a gabled house in Rochester, he had sat in misery while John Summer and Sarah Belknap had told him moonily about their happiness. “I wanted you to be the first to know, Howard,” Sarah had said. Butler had blundered into it that evening, bringing flowers and a new offer of his heart; then he was suddenly made aware that things were changed, that he wasn’t very alive for either of them. Later, something she had said was quoted or misquoted to him — that if John Summer had not come along, she’d have been condemned to marry Howard Butler.

Years later he had walked into the office one morning to find her his subordinate. This time there was something menacing and repellent in his wooing, and she had put a stop to it immediately, definitely and finally. Then, for eight years, Butler had suffered her presence in the office, drying out in the sunshine of her vitality, growing bitter in the shadow of her indifference; aware that, despite her widowhood, her life was more complete than his.

“I can’t do it,” he said, as if regretfully. “Things are stripped to the bone here. There’s no one you could displace. Miss Wiess has been here twelve years.”

“I wonder if it would do any good to talk to Mr. Eddington.”

“He’s not in New York, and it wouldn’t do any good.”

She was beaten, but she went on evenly, “Is there any likelihood of a change, in the next month, say?”

Butler shrugged his shoulders. “How does anybody know when business will pick up? I’ll keep you in mind if anything turns up.” Then he added, in a surge of weakness: “Come back in a week or so, some afternoon between three and four.”

Mrs. Summer got up; she looked older than when she had come into the office.

“I’ll come back then.” She stood twisting her gloves, and her eyes seemed to stare out into more space than the office inclosed. “If you haven’t anything for me then, I’ll probably just — quit permanently.”

She walked quickly to the window, and he half rose from his chair.

“Nine floors is a nice height,” she remarked. “You could think things out one more time on the way down.”

“Oh, don’t talk that way. You’ll get a break any day now.”

“Business Woman Leaps Nine Floors to Death,” said Mrs. Summer, her eyes still fixed out the window. She sighed in a long, frightened breath, and turned toward the door. “Good-by, Howard. If you think things over, you’ll see I was right in not even trying to love you. I’ll be back some day next week, between three and four.”

He thought of offering her five dollars, but that would break down something inside him, so he let her go like that.

II

He saw her through the transparent place where the frosting was rubbed from the glass of his door. She was thinner than she had been last week, and obviously nervous, starting at anyone coming in or going out. Her foot was turned sideways under the chair and he saw where an oval hole was stopped with a piece of white cardboard.

When her name was telephoned, he said, “Wait,” letting himself be annoyed that she had come slightly before three; but the real cause of his anger lay in the fact that he wasn’t up to seeing her again. To postpone his realization of the decision made in his subconscious, he dictated several letters and held a telephone conversation with the head office. When he had finished, he found it was five minutes to four; he hadn’t meant to detain her an hour. He phoned Miss Wiess that he had no news for Mrs. Summer and couldn’t see her.

Through the glass he watched her take the news. It seemed to him that she swayed as she got up and stood blinking at Miss Wiess.

“I hope she’s gone for good,” Butler said to himself. “I can’t be responsible for everybody out of work in this city. I’d go crazy.”

Later he came downstairs into a belt of low, stifling city heat; twice on his way home he stopped at soda fountains for cold drinks. In his apartment he locked the door, as he so often did lately, as if he were raising a barrier against all the anxiety outside. He moved about, putting away some laundry, opening bills, brushing his coat and hanging it up — for he was very neat — and singing to himself: