The Best Early Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald (6 page)

II

On Thursday night Horace Tarbox sat in an aisle seat in the fifth row and witnessed “Home James.” Oddly enough he found that he was enjoying himself. The cynical students near him were annoyed at his audible appreciation of time-honored jokes in the Hammerstein
¹⁹
tradition. But Horace was waiting with anxiety for Marcia Meadow singing her song about a Jazz-bound Blundering Blimp. When she did appear, radiant under a floppity flower-faced hat, a warm glow settled over him, and when the song was over he did not join in the storm of applause. He felt somewhat numb.

In the intermission after the second act an usher materialized beside him, demanded to know if he were Mr. Tarbox, and then handed him a note written in a round adolescent hand. Horace read it in some confusion, while the usher lingered with withering patience in the aisle.

“DEAR OMAR: After the show I always grow an awful hunger. If you want to satisfy it for me in the Taft Grill just communicate your answer to the big-timber guide that brought this and oblige.

Your friend, MARCIA MEADOW.”

“Tell her”—he coughed—“tell her that it will be quite all right. I’ll meet her in front of the theatre.”

The big-timber guide smiled arrogantly.

“I giss she meant for you to come roun’ t’ the stage door.”

“Where—where is it?”

“Ou’side. Tunayulef. Down ee alley.”

“What?”

“Ou’side. Turn to y’ left! Down ee alley!”

The arrogant person withdrew. A freshman behind Horace snickered.

Then half an hour later, sitting in the Taft Grill opposite the hair that was yellow by natural pigment, the prodigy was saying an odd thing.

“Do you have to do that dance in the last act?” he was asking earnestly—“I mean, would they dismiss you if you refused to do it?”

Marcia grinned.

“It’s fun to do it. I like to do it.”

And then Horace came out with a
faux pas.

“I should think you’d detest it,” he remarked succinctly. “The people behind me were making remarks about your bosom.”

Marcia blushed fiery red.

“I can’t help that,” she said quickly. “The dance to me is only a sort of acrobatic stunt. Lord, it’s hard enough to do! I rub liniment into my shoulders for an hour every night.”

“Do you have—fun while you’re on the stage?”

“Uh-huh—sure! I got in the habit of having people look at me, Omar, and I like it.”

“Hm!” Horace sank into a brownish study.

“How’s the Brazilian trimmings?”

“Hm!” repeated Horace, and then after a pause: “Where does the play go from here?”

“New York.”

“For how long?”

“All depends. Winter—maybe.”

“Oh!”

“Coming up to lay eyes on me, Omar, or aren’t you int’rested? Not as nice here, is it, as it was up in your room? I wish we was there now.”

“I feel idiotic in this place,” confessed Horace, looking round him nervously.

“Too bad! We got along pretty well.”

At this he looked suddenly so melancholy that she changed her tone, and reaching over patted his hand.

“Ever take an actress out to supper before?”

“No,” said Horace miserably, “and I never will again. I don’t know why I came to-night. Here under all these lights and with all these people laughing and chattering I feel completely out of my sphere. I don’t know what to talk to you about.”

“We’ll talk about me. We talked about you last time.”

“Very well.”

“Well, my name really is Meadow, but my first name isn’t Marcia— it’s Veronica. I’m nineteen. Question—how did the girl make her leap to the footlights? Answer—she was born in Passaic, New Jersey, and up to a year ago she got the right to breathe by pushing Nabiscoes in Marcel’s tea-room in Trenton. She started going with a guy named Rob-bins, a singer in the Trent House cabaret, and he got her to try a song and dance with him one evening. In a month we were filling the supper-room every night. Then we went to New York with meet-my-friend letters thick as a pile of napkins.

“In two days we’d landed a job at Divinerries’, and I learned to shimmy
²⁰
from a kid at the Palais Royal. We stayed at Divinerries’ six months until one night Peter Boyce Wendell, the columnist, ate his milk-toast there. Next morning a poem about Marvellous Marcia came out in his newspaper, and within two days I had three vaudeville offers and a chance at the Midnight Frolic. I wrote Wendell a thank-you letter, and he printed it in his column—said that the style was like Carlyle’s,
²¹
only more rugged, and that I ought to quit dancing and do North American literature. This got me a coupla more vaudeville offers and a chance as an ingénue in a regular show. I took it—and here I am, Omar.”

When she finished they sat for a moment in silence, she draping the last skeins of a Welsh rabbit on her fork and waiting for him to speak.

“Let’s get out of here,” he said suddenly.

Marcia’s eyes hardened.

“What’s the idea? Am I making you sick?”

“No, but I don’t like it here. I don’t like to be sitting here with you.” Without another word Marcia signalled for the waiter.

“What’s the check?” she demanded briskly. “My part—the rabbit and the ginger ale.”

Horace watched blankly as the waiter figured it.

“See here,” he began, “I intended to pay for yours too. You’re my guest.”

With a half-sigh Marcia rose from the table and walked from the room. Horace, his face a document in bewilderment, laid a bill down and followed her out, up the stairs and into the lobby. He overtook her in front of the elevator and they faced each other.

“See here,” he repeated, “you’re my guest. Have I said something to offend you?”

After an instant of wonder Marcia’s eyes softened.

“You’re a rude fella,” she said slowly. “Don’t you know you’re rude?”

“I can’t help it,” said Horace with a directness she found quite disarming. “You know I like you.”

“You said you didn’t like being with me.”

“I didn’t like it.”

“Why not?”

Fire blazed suddenly from the gray forests of his eyes.

“Because I didn’t. I’ve formed the habit of liking you. I’ve been thinking of nothing much else for two days.”

“Well, if you——”

“Wait a minute,” he interrupted. “I’ve got something to say. It’s this: in six weeks I’ll be eighteen years old. When I’m eighteen years old I’m coming up to New York to see you. Is there some place in New York where we can go and not have a lot of people in the room?”

“Sure!” smiled Marcia. “You can come up to my ’partment. Sleep on the couch, if you want to.”

“I can’t sleep on couches,” he said shortly. “But I want to talk to you.”

“Why, sure,” repeated Marcia—“in my ’partment.”

In his excitement Horace put his hands in his pockets.

“All right—just so I can see you alone. I want to talk to you as we talked up in my room.”

“Honey boy,” cried Marcia, laughing, “is it that you want to kiss me?”

“Yes,” Horace almost shouted. “I’ll kiss you if you want me to.”

The elevator man was looking at them reproachfully. Marcia edged toward the grated door.

“I’ll drop you a post-card,” she said.

Horace’s eyes were quite wild.

“Send me a post-card! I’ll come up any time after January first. I’ll be eighteen then.”

And as she stepped into the elevator he coughed enigmatically, yet with a vague challenge, at the ceiling, and walked quickly away.

III

He was there again. She saw him when she took her first glance at the restless Manhattan audience—down in the front row with his head bent a bit forward and his gray eyes fixed on her. And she knew that to him they were alone together in a world where the high-rouged row of ballet faces and the massed whines of the violins were as imperceivable as powder on a marble Venus. An instinctive defiance rose within her.

“Silly boy!” she said to herself hurriedly, and she didn’t take her encore.

“What do they expect for a hundred a week—perpetual motion?” she grumbled to herself in the wings.

“What’s the trouble, Marcia?”

“Guy I don’t like down in front.”

During the last act as she waited for her specialty she had an odd attack of stage fright. She had never sent Horace the promised post-card. Last night she had pretended not to see him—had hurried from the theatre immediately after her dance to pass a sleepless night in her apartment, thinking—as she had so often in the last month—of his pale, rather intent face, his slim, boyish figure, the merciless, unworldly abstraction that made him charming to her.

And now that he had come she felt vaguely sorry—as though an unwonted responsibility was being forced on her.

“Infant prodigy!” she said aloud.

“What?” demanded the negro comedian standing beside her.

“Nothing—just talking about myself.”

On the stage she felt better. This was her dance—and she always felt that the way she did it wasn’t suggestive any more than to some men every pretty girl is suggestive. She made it a stunt.

“Uptown, downtown, jelly on a spoon,
After sundown shiver by the moon.”

He was not watching her now. She saw that clearly. He was looking very deliberately at a castle on the back drop, wearing that expression he had worn in the Taft Grill. A wave of exasperation swept over her— he was criticising her.

“That’s the vibration that thr-ills me,
Funny how affection fi-lls me,
Uptown, downtown——”

Unconquerable revulsion seized her. She was suddenly and horribly conscious of her audience as she had never been since her first appearance. Was that a leer on a pallid face in the front row, a droop of disgust on one young girl’s mouth? These shoulders of hers—these shoulders shaking—were they hers? Were they real? Surely shoulders weren’t made for this!

“Then—you’ll see at a glance
I’ll need some funeral ushers with St. Vitus dance
²²
At the end of the world I’ll——”

The bassoon and two cellos crashed into a final chord. She paused and poised a moment on her toes with every muscle tense, her young face looking out dully at the audience in what one young girl afterward called “such a curious, puzzled look,” and then without bowing rushed from the stage. Into the dressing-room she sped, kicked out of one dress and into another, and caught a taxi outside.

Her apartment was very warm—small, it was, with a row of professional pictures and sets of Kipling
²³
and O. Henry
²⁴
which she had bought once from a blue-eyed agent and read occasionally. And there were several chairs which matched, but were none of them comfortable, and a pink-shaded lamp with blackbirds painted on it and an atmosphere of rather stifled pink throughout. There were nice things in it—nice things unrelentingly hostile to each other, offsprings of a vicarious, impatient taste acting in stray moments. The worst was typified by a great picture framed in oak bark of Passaic as seen from the Erie Railroad—altogether a frantic, oddly extravagant, oddly penurious attempt to make a cheerful room. Marcia knew it was a failure.

Into this room came the prodigy and took her two hands awkwardly.

“I followed you this time,” he said.

“Oh!”

“I want you to marry me,” he said.

Her arms went out to him. She kissed his mouth with a sort of passionate wholesomeness.

“There!”

“I love you,” he said.

She kissed him again and then with a little sigh flung herself into an armchair and half lay there, shaken with absurd laughter.

“Why, you infant prodigy!” she cried.

“Very well, call me that if you want to. I once told you that I was ten thousand years older than you—I am.”

She laughed again.

“I don’t like to be disapproved of.”

“No one’s ever going to disapprove of you again.”

“Omar,” she asked, “why do you want to marry me?”

The prodigy rose and put his hands in his pockets.

“Because I love you, Marcia Meadow.”

And then she stopped calling him Omar.

“Dear boy,” she said, “you know I sort of love you. There’s something about you—I can’t tell what—that just puts my heart through the wringer every time I’m round you. But, honey—” She paused.

“But what?”

“But lots of things. But you’re only just eighteen, and I’m nearly twenty.”

“Nonsense!” he interrupted. “Put it this way—that I’m in my nineteenth year and you’re nineteen. That makes us pretty close—without counting that other ten thousand years I mentioned.”

Marcia laughed.

“But there are some more ‘buts.’ Your people——”

“My people!” exclaimed the prodigy ferociously. “My people tried to make a monstrosity out of me.” His face grew quite crimson at the enormity of what he was going to say. “My people can go way back and sit down!”

“My heavens!” cried Marcia in alarm. “All that? On tacks, I suppose.”

“Tacks—yes,” he agreed wildly—“on anything. The more I think of how they allowed me to become a little dried-up mummy——”

“What makes you think you’re that?” asked Marcia quietly—“me?”

“Yes. Every person I’ve met on the streets since I met you has made me jealous because they knew what love was before I did. I used to call it the ‘sex impulse.’ Heavens!”

“There’s more ‘buts,’ ” said Marcia.

“What are they?”

“How could we live?”

“I’ll make a living.”

“You’re in college.”

“Do you think I care anything about taking a Master of Arts degree?”

“You want to be Master of Me, hey?”

“Yes! What? I mean, no!”

Marcia laughed, and crossing swiftly over sat in his lap. He put his arm round her wildly and implanted the vestige of a kiss somewhere near her neck.

“There’s something white about you,” mused Marcia, “but it doesn’t sound very logical.”

“Oh, don’t be so darned reasonable!”

“I can’t help it,” said Marcia.

“I hate these slot-machine people!”

“But we——”

“Oh, shut up!”

And as Marcia couldn’t talk through her ears she had to.