Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald (Illustrated) (263 page)

More and more the chief problem was the tactful management of Hubert Blair. Apart from his unwillingness to learn his lines, he was a satisfactory hero, but off the stage he became a nuisance. He gave an endless private performance for Evelyn Beebe, which took such forms as chasing her amorously around the hall or of flipping peanuts over his shoulder to land mysteriously on the stage. Called to order, he would mutter, “Aw, shut up yourself,” just loud enough for Basil to guess, but not to hear.

But Evelyn Beebe was all that Basil had expected. Once on the stage, she compelled a breathless attention, and Basil recognized this by adding to her part. He envied the half-sentimental fun that she and Hubert derived from their scenes together and he felt a vague, impersonal jealousy that almost every night after rehearsal they drove around together in Hubert’s car.

One afternoon when matters had progressed a fortnight, Hubert came in an hour late, loafed through the first act and then informed Miss Halliburton that he was going home.

“What for?” Basil demanded.

“I’ve got some things I got to do.”

“Are they important?”

“What business is that of yours?”

“Of course it’s my business,” said Basil heatedly, whereupon Miss Halliburton interfered.

“There’s no use of anybody getting angry. What Basil means, Hubert, is that if it’s just some small thing--why, we’re all giving up our pleasures to make this play a success.”

Hubert listened with obvious boredom.

“I’ve got to drive downtown and get father.”

He looked coolly at Basil, as if challenging him to deny the adequacy of this explanation.

“Then why did you come an hour late?” demanded Basil.

“Because I had to do something for mother.”

A group had gathered and he glanced around triumphantly. It was one of those sacred excuses, and only Basil saw that it was disingenuous.

“Oh, tripe!” he said.

“Maybe you think so--Bossy.”

Basil took a step toward him, his eyes blazing.

“What’d you say?”

“I said ‘Bossy.’ Isn’t that what they call you at school?”

It was true. It had followed him home. Even as he went white with rage a vast impotence surged over him at the realization that the past was always lurking near. The faces of school were around him, sneering and watching. Hubert laughed.

“Get out!” said Basil in a strained voice. “Go on! Get right out!”

Hubert laughed again, but as Basil took a step toward him he retreated.

“I don’t want to be in your play anyhow. I never did.”

“Then go on out of this hall.”

“Now, Basil!” Miss Halliburton hovered breathlessly beside them. Hubert laughed again and looked about for his cap.

“I wouldn’t be in your crazy old show,” he said. He turned slowly and jauntily, and sauntered out the door.

Riply Buckner read Hubert’s part that afternoon, but there was a cloud upon the rehearsal. Miss Beebe’s performance lacked its customary verve and the others clustered and whispered, falling silent when Basil came near. After the rehearsal, Miss Halliburton, Riply and Basil held a conference. Upon Basil flatly refusing to take the leading part, it was decided to enlist a certain Mayall De Bec, known slightly to Riply, who had made a name for himself in theatricals at the Central High School.

But next day a blow fell that was irreparable. Evelyn, flushed and uncomfortable, told Basil and Miss Halliburton that her family’s plans had changed--they were going East next week and she couldn’t be in the play after all. Basil understood. Only Hubert had held her this long.

“Good-by,” he said gloomily.

His manifest despair shamed her and she tried to justify herself.

“Really, I can’t help it. Oh, Basil, I’m so sorry!”

“Couldn’t you stay over a week with me after your family goes?” Miss Halliburton asked innocently.

“Not possibly. Father wants us all to go together. That’s the only reason. If it wasn’t for that I’d stay.”

“All right,” Basil said. “Good-by.”

“Basil, you’re not mad, are you?” A gust of repentance swept over her. “I’ll do anything to help. I’ll come to rehearsals this week until you get someone else, and then I’ll try to help her all I can. But father says we’ve got to go.”

In vain Riply tried to raise Basil’s morale after the rehearsal that afternoon, making suggestions which he waved contemptuously away. Margaret Torrence? Connie Davies? They could hardly play the parts they had. It seemed to Basil as if the undertaking was falling to pieces before his eyes.

It was still early when he got home. He sat dispiritedly by his bedroom window, watching the little Barnfield boy playing a lonesome game by himself in the yard next door.

His mother came in at five, and immediately sensed his depression.

“Teddy Barnfield has the mumps,” she said, in an effort to distract him. “That’s why he’s playing there all alone.”

“Has he?” he responded listlessly.

“It isn’t at all dangerous, but it’s very contagious. You had it when you were seven.”

“H’m.”

She hesitated.

“Are you worrying about your play? Has anything gone wrong?”

“No, mother. I just want to be alone.”

After a while he got up and started after a malted milk at the soda fountain around the corner. It was half in his mind to see Mr. Beebe and ask him if he couldn’t postpone his trip East. If he could only be sure that that was Evelyn’s real reason.

The sight of Evelyn’s nine-year-old brother coming along the street broke in on his thoughts.

“Hello, Ham. I hear you’re going away.”

Ham nodded.

“Going next week. To the seashore.”

Basil looked at him speculatively, as if, through his proximity to Evelyn, he held the key to the power of moving her.

“Where are you going now?” he asked.

“I’m going to play with Teddy Barnfield.”

“What!” Basil exclaimed. “Why, didn’t you know--” He stopped. A wild, criminal idea broke over him; his mother’s words floated through his mind: “It isn’t at all dangerous, but it’s very contagious.” If little Ham Beebe got the mumps, and Evelyn
couldn’t
go away--

He came to a decision quickly and coolly.

“Teddy’s playing in his back yard,” he said. “If you want to see him without going through his house, why don’t you go down this street and turn up the alley?”

“All right. Thanks,” said Ham trustingly.

Basil stood for a minute looking after him until he turned the corner into the alley, fully aware that it was the worst thing he had ever done in his life.

III

A week later Mrs. Lee had an early supper--all Basil’s favorite things: chipped beef, french-fried potatoes, sliced peaches and cream, and devil’s food.

Every few minutes Basil said, “Gosh! I wonder what time it is,” and went out in the hall to look at the clock. “Does that clock work right?” he demanded with sudden suspicion. It was the first time the matter had ever interested him.

“Perfectly all right. If you eat so fast you’ll have indigestion and then you won’t be able to act well.”

“What do you think of the program?” he asked for the third time. “Riply Buckner, Jr., presents Basil Duke Lee’s comedy, ‘The Captured Shadow.’“

“I think it’s very nice.”

“He doesn’t really present it.”

“It sounds very well though.”

“I wonder what time it is?” he inquired.

“You just said it was ten minutes after six.”

“Well, I guess I better be starting.”

“Eat your peaches, Basil. If you don’t eat you won’t be able to act.”

“I don’t have to act,” he said patiently. “All I am is a small part, and it wouldn’t matter--” It was too much trouble to explain.

“Please don’t smile at me when I come on, mother,” he requested. “Just act as if I was anybody else.”

“Can’t I even say how-do-you-do?”

“What?” Humor was lost on him. He said good-by. Trying very hard to digest not his food but his heart, which had somehow slipped down into his stomach, he started off for the Martindale School.

As its yellow windows loomed out of the night his excitement became insupportable; it bore no resemblance to the building he had been entering so casually for three weeks. His footsteps echoed symbolically and portentously in its deserted hall; upstairs there was only the janitor setting out the chairs in rows, and Basil wandered about the vacant stage until someone came in.

It was Mayall De Bec, the tall, clever, not very likeable youth they had imported from Lower Crest Avenue to be the leading man. Mayall, far from being nervous, tried to engage Basil in casual conversation. He wanted to know if Basil thought Evelyn Beebe would mind if he went to see her sometime when the show was over. Basil supposed not. Mayall said he had a friend whose father owned a brewery who owned a twelve-cylinder car.

Basil said, “Gee!”

At quarter to seven the participants arrived in groups--Riply Buckner with the six boys he had gathered to serve as ticket takers and ushers; Miss Halliburton, trying to seem very calm and reliable; Evelyn Beebe, who came in as if she were yielding herself up to something and whose glance at Basil seemed to say: “Well, it looks as if I’m really going through with it after all.”

Mayall De Bec was to make up the boys and Miss Halliburton the girls. Basil soon came to the conclusion that Miss Halliburton knew nothing about make-up, but he judged it diplomatic, in that lady’s overwrought condition, to say nothing, but to take each girl to Mayall for corrections when Miss Halliburton had done.

An exclamation from Bill Kampf, standing at a crack in the curtain, brought Basil to his side. A tall bald-headed man in spectacles had come in and was shown to a seat in the middle of the house, where he examined the program. He was the public. Behind those waiting eyes, suddenly so mysterious and incalculable, was the secret of the play’s failure or success. He finished the program, took off his glasses and looked around. Two old ladies and two little boys came in, followed immediately by a dozen more.

“Hey, Riply,” Basil called softly. “Tell them to put the children down in front.”

Riply, struggling into his policeman’s uniform, looked up, and the long black mustache on his upper lip quivered indignantly.

“I thought of that long ago.”

The hall, filling rapidly, was now alive with the buzz of conversation. The children in front were jumping up and down in their seats, and everyone was talking and calling back and forth save the several dozen cooks and housemaids who sat in stiff and quiet pairs about the room.

Then, suddenly, everything was ready. It was incredible. “Stop! Stop!” Basil wanted to say. “It can’t be ready. There must be something--there always has been something,” but the darkened auditorium and the piano and violin from Geyer’s Orchestra playing “Meet Me in the Shadows” belied his words. Miss Saunders, Leilia Van Baker and Leilia’s friend, Estella Carrage, were already seated on the stage, and Miss Halliburton stood in the wings with the prompt book. Suddenly the music ended and the chatter in front died away.

“Oh, gosh!” Basil thought. “Oh, my gosh!”

The curtain rose. A clear voice floated up from somewhere. Could it be from that unfamiliar group on the stage?

I will, Miss Saunders. I tell you I will!

But, Miss Leilia, I don’t consider the newspapers proper for young ladies nowadays.

I don’t care. I want to read about this wonderful gentleman burglar they call The Shadow.

It was actually going on. Almost before he realized it, a ripple of laughter passed over the audience as Evelyn gave her imitation of Miss Saunders behind her back.

“Get ready, Basil,” breathed Miss Halliburton.

Basil and Bill Kampf, the crooks, each took an elbow of Victor Van Baker, the dissolute son of the house, and made ready to aid him through the front door.

It was strangely natural to be out on the stage with all those eyes looking up encouragingly. His mother’s face floated past him, other faces that he recognized and remembered.

Bill Kampf stumbled on a line and Basil picked him up quickly and went on.

MISS SAUNDERS: So you are alderman from the Sixth Ward?

RABBIT SIMMONS: Yes, ma’am.

MISS SAUNDERS (
shaking her head kittenishly
): Just what is an alderman?

CHINAMAN RUDD: An alderman is halfway between a politician and a pirate.

This was one of Basil’s lines that he was particularly proud of--but there was not a sound from the audience, not a smile. A moment later Bill Kampf absent-mindedly wiped his forehead with his handkerchief and then stared at it, startled by the red stains of make-up on it--and the audience roared. The theater was like that.

MISS SAUNDERS: Then you believe in spirits, Mr. Rudd.

CHINAMAN RUDD: Yes, ma’am, I certainly do believe in spirits. Have you got any?

The first big scene came. On the darkened stage a window rose slowly and Mayall De Bec, “in a full evening dress,” climbed over the sill. He was tiptoeing cautiously from one side of the stage to the other, when Leilia Van Baker came in. For a moment she was frightened, but he assured her that he was a friend of her brother Victor. They talked. She told him naïvely yet feelingly of her admiration for The Shadow, of whose exploits she had read. She hoped, though, that The Shadow would not come here tonight, as the family jewels were all in that safe at the right.

The stranger was hungry. He had been late for his dinner and so had not been able to get any that night. Would he have some crackers and milk? That would be fine. Scarcely had she left the room when he was on his knees by the safe, fumbling at the catch, undeterred by the unpromising word “Cake” stencilled on the safe’s front. It swung open, but he heard footsteps outside and closed it just as Leilia came back with the crackers and milk.

They lingered, obviously attracted to each other. Miss Saunders came in, very kittenish, and was introduced. Again Evelyn mimicked her behind her back and the audience roared. Other members of the household appeared and were introduced to the stranger.