Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald (Illustrated) (410 page)

For Mimi it is another story. As Ben leads her out on the floor she takes his arm, leans close and looks up at him with languorous eyes. But her arm receives no answering pressure and his eyes seem unusually cold and far away, as if he had something on his mind.

They are standing near the foot of a winding staircase that rises out of a corner of the trophy room.

“Where does that go?” she asks.

“That’s called Wedding Stair,” he answers politely, but indifferently. “It leads up to Honeymoon Tower.”

“Is the view nice?” Again she tries the effect of the lipstick by leaning close to him, but he is unresponsive. She turns away to hide her disappointment and comes face to face with Dolly who has just emerged from the dressing room and overheard the conversation. Giving Dolly a glance of ill concealed malice Mimi walks with Ben into the ballroom.

Dolly hasn’t used the lipstick yet tonight. She scarcely knows why. What is the use if Ben won’t come near?

Strangely enough other boys seemed to like her just as well without it. They danced with her and she was, if anything, relieved that they no longer leaned toward her in just that eager way. But Ben didn’t come near and her heart grew numb and nothing seemed to matter at all.

She is sitting with Professor Swope in the Trophy Room between dances when her eyes are arrested by the sight of Ben lighting a cigarette and strolling moodily through the entrance to the Wedding Stair as if he were going up. The professor at the moment is asking Dolly to marry him. He tells her that at great personal sacrifice he has put her criminal past out of mind. In the middle of the unromantic declaration Dolly unceremoniously jumps to her feet and announces that she wants to go up to the tower. Professor Swope readily accedes.

The winding stair is well occupied. Near the bottom sit a couple, the girl fixing a flower into the man’s buttonhole. Around the next bend another couple are holding hands. Further up two are absorbed in an embrace, and further still a man is fitting an engagement ring on to a girl’s finger.

When the professor and Dolly have climbed this far, she stops and tells him that she doesn’t know whether she is worthy of him. She will have to ask herself. Will he wait here and let no one pass while she consults her conscience up on the tower?

He sits down and folds his hands prepared to wait. Dolly continues on up. Ben Manny is nearly at the top when he hears footsteps following him. He stops suspiciously — he wants to be alone and think. Somehow he isn’t happy that his engagement to Mimi will be announced tomorrow.

The footsteps have stopped so he goes on. Near the top he pauses again, hearing them distinctly. But again they stop and he walks out into the moonlight on top of the battlemented tower. Very quietly Dolly follows. Below is spread the college — a thousand lights in the windows of the Gothic halls, and, soaring against the dark horizon twoscore dreaming spires and towers. Ben is leaning against the battlement, staring off into the night.

“Here I am,” said Dolly faintly.

He turned around and came toward her slowly.

“I knew it was you,” he said. “I can’t escape you anywhere.”

They walked into each other’s arms and she turned up her face, but this time instead of kissing her he held her rigidly and looked at her in the moonlight.

“What was the matter?” he said almost harshly. “Why did they send you to prison?”

“For a crime,” she answered.

As he looked at her he was unable to believe it possible, if he hadn’t seen her in a prison cell.

Meanwhile Mimi has come up the stairs in search of Ben and encountered the professor. She is skeptical of his story that Dolly is up on top meditating all alone, and communicates her suspicion to him.

Incredulously the professor accompanies her to the top and stands with her for a moment, silently watching. They see Ben and Dolly come toward each other again, as if drawn by an irresistible force, hesitate, and then, with Ben’s face only an inch away from hers, break apart, without speaking, the professor draws Mimi down the stairs. He is distraught and wild.

“I knew it,” he says miserably. “That’s what comes of trusting a girl with a prison past. I found out in the nick of time.”

“A prison past?” repeats Mimi, her eyes narrowing. “A prison
past?”

Innocently he repeats the whole story to Mimi, without seeing that he is putting a dangerous weapon into her hands.

As they descend the steps they encounter Joe Jakes coming up — he has been turning the couples out of the tower upon orders from the Dean who has decided that necking parties have gone far enough.

“Anyone else up there?” he demands of the professor.

The professor is too distraught to reply, even to hear, but Mimi answers for him. She shakes her head implying no, well aware that
Ben and Dol
ly are on the tower.

When everyone is out Joe Jakes closes the door to the wedding stair and hangs a sign on it.

Any undergraduate found in this tower will be indefinitely suspended.

By Order of the Dean.

Mimi, when no one is looking, turns the key in the lock, effectually preventing Ben and Dolly from coming out.

At the moment Ben and Dolly are too wrapped up in themselves to care what is happening below. She knows the struggle that is going on in Ben, knows that he cares for her, yet she cannot make him kiss her when he holds her in his arms. She takes out the lipstick, brings it near her lips — then shakes her head. No — better give up and let it and tonight with all pleasant things than know that she had made him declare himself by a trick.

“Oh, Ben — “ she cried aloud, “Ben — “

He stood with his back to her, silent and motionless. Once more she raised the lipstick, hesitated, then she dashed it to the stone floor of the tower and blind with tears turned away toward the stair.

But now there was a strong arm about her, a face near to her and a voice she knew whispering what she had not hoped to hear.

“I love you. I love you.”

With a long sigh of happiness she melted into his dinner coat.

Downstairs other forces are in motion — a clucking of hens in one box with Mimi in the center feeding them the poison grain. She tells the story the professor has told her, keeping back only the identity of the girl. Disgraceful. A blackbird among all those swallows. The clucks soar to a crescendo — it is a case for the Dean.

And Mimi has another string to her bow — Ben and Dolly are in the forbidden tower. Once the agitation against Dolly’s presence is under way she seeks Joe Jakes outside the door.

“Please,” she asks innocently. “Can’t anyone go in the tower?”

“I’m sorry, Miss, nobody.”

“But,” she protests, “I saw a couple go up there not ten minutes ago.

Upon the tower the night is soft as a benediction. With Dolly in the circle of his arms, Ben is reading a paper she has taken from her bosom and handed to him. But almost before he has comprehended what it means to them, to their love, a bell sounds the strokes of midnight from another tower.

Twelve o’clock. The grand march which he, as chairman of the committee, must lead!

He seizes her hand and pulls her down the steps three at a time. To his astonishment the door is locked. He considers — he knows there has been some talk of closing the tower and concludes that this is the result.

Somewhat worried they climb once more to the top of the tower and hand in hand survey the prospects of escape. Downstairs, though they are unaware of it, Joe Jakes, breathing fire, is already at the stair door.

Forty feet below the tower is the pebble covered roof of the adjoining Gothic building, and by great luck a vine pruner’s ladder is resting against the ivied tower wall. Down they go to the roof — pick out a lighted window in the next quadrangle and silhouetted clearly against the moon, scurry toward it along the battlement. One can go a good three miles over the medieval chain of masonry that winds in and out over the campus, forming in turn halls, towers, and quadrangles, without once descending to earth, but this is not their object. They know now that there a determined figure is scrambling along behind them in full pursuit. With the aid of a slide down a slanting slate roof, they reach a window. It is the work of but a moment, to break a pane, step inside, toss fifty cents on the table to pay for damages and dash downstairs.

Back at the prom the scandal had just reached the Dean’s ears. The little committee of chaperones, buzzing with restrained indignation, “really thought that this was too much.” Not only should the girl be ejected but the man responsible for bringing her should be severely disciplined. The Dean agreed that he would take action. They had only to supply the name of the girl.

The box where this sub rosa dispute took place was the center of attention as rumor began to drift about. Purity demanded a sacrifice — someone was going to be decorated with the scarlet letter and publicly thrown out of the prom. Only Dolly and Ben who had just drifted breathlessly in and drifted out upon the floor were awareof what hung over Dolly’s head. They and Professor Swope who had discovered the allurements of Grace Jones and was quickly forgetting his sorrows of an hour before.

Mimi waited triumphant. In a minute it would be time — when the proctor brought them down from the tower she would say the word, and Ben would see the lady of his fancy disgraced before his eyes.

Someone else was watching too — one of the men who figures in this story, with in his coat pocket which he fingered with a twitchy hand.

By the time Ben and Dolly realize that something is up and join the fringe of the little group, the Dean is growing impatient.

“All right, Miss Haughton,” he says impatiently. “Let me have the name of this unfortunate young lady. We don’t want a public scene.”

Ben and Dolly hear and pause. Her face turns white; Ben’s arm tightens on her.

“I’m behind you whatever happens,” he says. “Remember that and keep your head.”

For another moment Mimi hesitates triumphantly — hesitates just a fraction too long, for she hears a familiar and insinuating voice low in her ear.

“Mimi, you’d better not say a word.”

She turns. It is Cupid. His hand slides a little from his pocket and she sees what he has in his hand.

“It’s better to have a jail term over, Mimi, than to have one staring you in the face.”

“Why — what do you mean?” she gasps.

“I mean that we saw you take this bag and we saw you throw it away. There happens to be a law against larceny in this state, and if you say one word about Miss Dolly Carrol, just as sure as you’re alive you’ll go to jail.”

His stout face is very grim and determined now — Dolly retreats a little bit before him. The Dean’s voice breaks in on them again.

“I’ll have to ask you to tell me the girl’s name.”

Mimi looks about, hate and rage in her eyes. Then she meets Cupid’s glance and her expression changes to one of fear.

“I’m — I’m sorry,” she falters, “I don’t know the name. I was mistaken. I must have been wrong.”

A minute later the group dissolved in laughter and contempt and not long after Mimi and her mother might have been seen making their way hurriedly toward the door. It was time for the grand march and as Ben had no partner now what more natural than that he should ask Dolly, or that the professor should be more content with Grace, or that Cupid should be happiest with nobody at all.

There they go!

I must add that the lipstick was found by a little colored girl delivering laundry, who in consequence grew up and had a perfectly enormous family.

Ben and Dolly were never known to care.

THE LOVE BOAT

The boat floated down the river through the summer night like a Fourth of July balloon footloose in the heavens. The decks were brightly lit and restless with dancers, but bow and stern were in darkness; so the boat had no more outline than an accidental cluster of stars. Between the black banks it floated, softly parting the mild dark tide from the sea and leaving in its wake small excited gusts of music — “Babes in the Woods” over and over, and “Moonlight Bay.” Past the scattered lights of Pokus Landing, where a poet in an attic window saw yellow hair gleam in the turn of a dance. Past Ulm, where the moon came up out of a boiler works, and West Esther, where it slid, unregretted, behind a cloud.

The radiance of the boat itself was enough for, among others, the three young Harvard graduates; they were weary and a little depressed and they gave themselves up promptly to its enchantment. Their own boat was casually drifting and a collision was highly possible, but no one made a movement to start the engine and get out of the way.

“It makes me very sad,” one of them said. “It is so beautiful that it makes me want to cry.”

“Go on and cry, Bill.”

“Will you cry too?”

“We’ll all cry.”

His loud, facetious “Boo-hoo!” echoed across the night, reached the steamer and brought a small lively crowd to the rail.

“Look! It’s a launch.”

“Some guys in a launch.”

Bill got to his feet. The two crafts were scarcely ten feet apart.

“Throw us a hempen rope,” he pleaded eloquently. “Come on — be impulsive. Please do.”

Once in a hundred years there would have been a rope at hand. It was there that night. With a thud the coil struck the wooden bottom and in an instant the motorboat was darting along behind the steamer, as if in the wake of a harpooned whale.

Fifty high-school couples left the dance and scrambled for a place around the suddenly interesting stern rail. Fifty girls gave forth immemorial small cries of excitement and sham fright. Fifty young men forgot the mild exhibitionism which had characterized their manner of the evening and looked grudgingly at the more effectual show-off of three others. Mae Purley, without the involuntary quiver of an eyelash, fitted the young man standing in the boat into her current dream, where he displaced Al Fitzpatrick with laughable ease. She put her hand on Al Fitzpatrick’s arm and squeezed it a little because she had stopped thinking about him entirely and felt that he must be aware of it. Al, who had been standing with his eyes squinted up, watching the towed boat, looked tenderly at Mae and tried to put his arm about her shoulder. But Mae Purley and Bill Frothington, handsome and full of all the passionate promise in the world, had locked eyes across the intervening space.