Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald (Illustrated) (273 page)

They stopped at a sporting-goods store and Adele Craw, a pretty girl with clear honourable eyes and piano legs, purchased the sporting equipment which was the reason for their trip--they were the spring hockey committee for the school. Adele was in addition the president of the senior class and the school’s ideal girl. She had lately seen a change for the better in Josephine Perry--rather as an honest citizen might guilelessly approve a speculator retired on his profits. On the other hand, Adele was simply incomprehensible to Josephine--admirable, without doubt, but a member of another species. Yet with the charming adaptability that she had hitherto reserved for men, Josephine was trying hard not to disillusion her, trying to be honestly interested in the small, neat, organized politics of the school.

Two men who had stood with their backs to them at another counter turned to leave the store, when they caught sight of Miss Chambers and Adele. Immediately they came forward. The one who spoke to Miss Chambers was thin and rigid of face. Josephine recognized him as Miss Brereton’s nephew, a student at New Haven, who had spent several week-ends with his aunt at the school. The other man Josephine had never seen before. He was tall and broad, with blond curly hair and an open expression in which strength of purpose and a nice consideration were pleasantly mingled. It was not the sort of face that generally appealed to Josephine. The eyes were obviously without a secret, with a sidewise gambol, without a desperate flicker to show that they had a life of their own apart from the mouth’s speech. The mouth itself was large and masculine; its smile was an act of kindness and control. It was rather with curiosity as to the sort of man who would be attentive to Adele Craw that Josephine continued to look at him, for his voice that obviously couldn’t lie greeted Adele as if this meeting was the pleasant surprise of his day.

In a moment Josephine and Lillian were called over and introduced.

‘This is Mr Waterbury’--that was Miss Brereton’s nephew--’and Mr Dudley Knowleton.’

Glancing at Adele, Josephine saw on her face an expression of tranquil pride, even of possession. Mr Knowleton spoke politely, but it was obvious that though he looked at the younger girls he did not quite see them. But since they were friends of Adele’s he made suitable remarks, eliciting the fact that they were both coming down to New Haven to their first prom the following week. Who were their hosts? Sophomores; he knew them slightly. Josephine thought that was unnecessarily superior. Why, they were the charter members of the Loving Brothers’ Association--Ridgeway Saunders and George Davey--and on the glee-club trip the girls they picked out to rush in each city considered themselves a sort of élite, second only to the girls they asked to New Haven.

‘And oh, I’ve got some bad news for you,’ Knowleton said to Adele. ‘You may be leading the prom. Jack Coe went to the infirmary with appendicitis, and against my better judgement I’m the provisional chairman.’ He looked apologetic. ‘Being one of those stone-age dancers, the two-step king, I don’t see how I ever got on the committee at all.’

When the car was on its way back to Miss Brereton’s school, Josephine and Lillian bombarded Adele with questions.

‘He’s an old friend from Cincinnati,’ she explained demurely. ‘He’s captain of the baseball team and he was last man for Skull and Bones.’

‘You’re going to the prom with him?’

‘Yes. You see, I’ve known him all my life.’

Was there a faint implication in this remark that only those who had known Adele all her life knew her at her true worth?

‘Are you engaged?’ Lillian demanded.

Adele laughed. ‘Mercy, I don’t think of such matters! It doesn’t seem to be time for that sort of thing yet, does it?’ (‘Yes,’ interpolated Josephine silently.)’ We’re just good friends. I think there can be a perfectly healthy friendship between a man and a girl without a lot of--’

‘Mush,’ supplied Lillian helpfully.

‘Well, yes, but I don’t like that word. I was going to say without a lot of sentimental romantic things that ought to come later.’

‘Bravo, Adele!’ said Miss Chambers somewhat perfunctorily.

But Josephine’s curiosity was unappeased.

‘Doesn’t he say he’s in love with you, and all that sort of thing?’

‘Mercy, no! Dud doesn’t believe in such stuff any more than I do. He’s got enough to do at New Haven, serving on the committees and the team.’

‘Oh!’ said Josephine.

She was oddly interested. That two people who were attracted to each other should never even say anything about it but be content to ‘not believe in such stuff’, was something new in her experience. She had known girls who had no beaux, others who seemed to have no emotions, and still others who lied about what they thought and did; but here was a girl who spoke of the attentions of the last man tapped for Skull and Bones as if they were two of the limestone gargoyles that Miss Chambers had pointed out on the just completed Harkness Hall. Yet Adele seemed happy--happier than Josephine, who had always believed that boys and girls were made for nothing but each other, and as soon as possible.

In the light of his popularity and achievements, Knowleton seemed more attractive. Josephine wondered if he would remember her and dance with her at the prom, or if that depended on how well he knew her escort, Ridgeway Saunders. She tried to remember whether she had smiled at him when he was looking at her. If she had really smiled he would remember her and dance with her. She was still trying to be sure of that over her two French irregular verbs and her ten stanzas of the Ancient Mariner that night; but she was still uncertain when she fell asleep.

II

Three gay young sophomores, the founders of the Loving Brothers’ Association, took a house together for Josephine, Lillian and a girl from Farmington and their three mothers. For the girls it was a first prom, and they arrived at New Haven with all the nervousness of the condemned; but a Sheffield fraternity tea in the afternoon yielded up such a plethora of boys from home, and boys who had visited there and friends of those boys, and new boys with unknown possibilities but obvious eagerness, that they were glowing with self-confidence as they poured into the glittering crowd that thronged the armoury at ten.

It was impressive; for the first time Josephine was at a function run by men upon men’s standards--an outward projection of the New Haven world from which women were excluded and which went on mysteriously behind the scenes. She perceived that their three escorts, who had once seemed the very embodiments of worldliness, were modest fry in this relentless microcosm of accomplishment and success. A man’s world! Looking around her at the glee-club concert, Josephine had felt a grudging admiration for the good fellowship, the good feeling. She envied Adele Craw, barely glimpsed in the dressing-room, for the position she automatically occupied by being Dudley Knowleton’s girl tonight. She envied her more stepping off under the draped bunting through a gateway of hydrangeas at the head of the grand march, very demure and faintly unpowdered in a plain white dress. She was temporarily the centre of all attention, and at the sight something that had long lain dormant in Josephine awakened--her sense of a problem, a scarcely defined possibility.

‘Josephine,’ Ridgeway Saunders began, ‘you can’t realize how happy I am now that it’s come true. I’ve looked forward to this so long, and dreamed about it--’

She smiled up at him automatically, but her mind was elsewhere, and as the dance progressed the idea continued to obsess her. She was rushed from the beginning; to the men from the tea were added a dozen new faces, a dozen confident or timid voices, until, like all the more popular girls, she had her own queue trailing her about the room. Yet all this had happened to her before, and there was something missing. One might have ten men to Adele’s two, but Josephine was abruptly aware that here a girl took on the importance of the man who had brought her.

She was discomforted by the unfairness of it. A girl earned her popularity by being beautiful and charming. The more beautiful and charming she was, the more she could afford to disregard public opinion. It seemed absurd that simply because Adele had managed to attach a baseball captain, who mightn’t know anything about girls at all, or be able to judge their attractions, she should be thus elevated in spite of her thick ankles, her rather too pinkish face.

Josephine was dancing with Ed Bement from Chicago. He was her earliest beau, a flame of pigtail days in dancing school when one wore white cotton stockings, lace drawers with a waist attached and ruffled dresses with the inevitable sash.

‘What’s the matter with me?’ she asked Ed, thinking aloud. ‘For months I’ve felt as if I were a hundred years old, and I’m just seventeen and that party was only seven years ago.’

‘You’ve been in love a lot since then,’ Ed said.

‘I haven’t,’ she protested indignantly. ‘I’ve had a lot of silly stories started about me, without any foundation, usually by girls who were jealous.’

‘Jealous of what?’

‘Don’t get fresh,’ she said tartly. ‘Dance me near Lillian.’

Dudley Knowleton had just cut in on Lillian. Josephine spoke to her friend; then waiting until their turns would bring them face to face over a space of seconds, she smiled at Knowleton. This time she made sure that smile intersected as well as met glance, that he passed beside the circumference of her fragrant charm. If this had been named like French perfume of a later day it might have been called ‘Please’. He bowed and smiled back; a minute later he cut in on her.

It was in an eddy in a corner of the room and she danced slower so that he adapted himself, and for a moment they went around in a slow circle.

‘You looked so sweet leading the march with Adele,’ she told him. ‘You seemed so serious and kind, as if the others were a lot of children. Adele looked sweet, too.’ And she added on an inspiration, ‘At school I’ve taken her for a model.’

‘You have!’ She saw him conceal his sharp surprise as he said, ‘I’ll have to tell her that.’

He was handsomer than she had thought, and behind his cordial good manners there was a sort of authority. Though he was correctly attentive to her, she saw his eyes search the room quickly to see if all went well; he spoke quietly, in passing, to the orchestra leader, who came down deferentially to the edge of his dais. Last man for Bones. Josephine knew what that meant--her father had been Bones. Ridgeway Saunders and the rest of the Loving Brothers’ Association would certainly not be Bones. She wondered, if there had been a Bones for girls, whether she would be tapped--or Adele Craw with her ankles, symbol of solidity.

Come on o-ver here.
Want to have you near;
Get a wel-come heart-y.
Come on join the part-y.

‘I wonder how many boys here have taken you for a model,’ she said. ‘If I were a boy you’d be exactly what I’d like to be. Except I’d be terribly bothered having girls falling in love with me all the time.’

‘They don’t,’ he said simply. ‘They never have.’

‘Oh yes--but they hide it because they’re so impressed with you, and they’re afraid of Adele.’

‘Adele wouldn’t object.’ And he added hastily, ‘--if it ever happened. Adele doesn’t believe in being serious about such things.’

‘Are you engaged to her?’

He stiffened a little. ‘I don’t believe in being engaged till the right time comes.’

‘Neither do I,’ agreed Josephine readily. ‘I’d rather have one good friend than a hundred people hanging around being mushy all the time.’

‘Is that what that crowd does that keeps following you around tonight?’

‘What crowd?’ she asked innocently.

‘The fifty per cent of the sophomore class that’s rushing you.’

‘A lot of parlour snakes,’ she said ungratefully.

Josephine was radiantly happy now as she turned beautifully through the newly enchanted hall in the arms of the chairman of the prom committee. Even this extra time with him she owed to the awe which he inspired in her entourage; but a man cut in eventually and there was a sharp fall in her elation. The man was impressed that Dudley Knowleton had danced with her; he was more respectful, and his modulated admiration bored her. In a little while, she hoped, Dudley Knowleton would cut back, but as midnight passed, dragging on another hour with it, she wondered if after all it had only been a courtesy to a girl from Adele’s school. Since then Adele had probably painted him a neat little landscape of Josephine’s past. When finally he approached her she grew tense and watchful, a state which made her exteriorly pliant and tender and quiet. But instead of dancing he drew her into the edge of a row of boxes.

‘Adele had an accident on the cloakroom steps. She turned her ankle a little and tore her stocking on a nail. She’d like to borrow a pair from you because you’re staying near here and we’re way out at the Lawn Club.’

‘Of course.’

‘I’ll run over with you--I have a car outside.’

‘But you’re busy; you mustn’t bother.’

‘Of course I’ll go with you.’

There was thaw in the air; a hint of thin and lucid spring hovered delicately around the elms and cornices of buildings whose bareness and coldness had so depressed her the week before. The night had a quality of asceticism, as if the essence of masculine struggle were seeping everywhere through the little city where men of three centuries had brought their energies and aspirations for winnowing. And Dudley Knowleton sitting beside her, dynamic and capable, was symbolic of it all. It seemed that she had never met a man before.

‘Come in, please,’ she said as he went up the steps of the house with her. ‘They’ve made it very comfortable.’

There was an open fire burning in the dark parlour. When she came downstairs with the stockings she went in and stood beside him, very still for a moment, watching it with him. Then she looked up, still silent, looked down, looked at him again.

‘Did you get the stockings?’ he asked, moving a little.

‘Yes,’ she said breathlessly. ‘Kiss me for being so quick.’

He laughed as if she said something witty and moved towards the door. She was smiling and her disappointment was deeply hidden as they got into the car.