The Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Great Gatsby, Tender Is the Night, This Side of Paradise, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, The Beautiful and Damned, The Love of the Last Tycoon and many more stories…. Фрэнсис Скотт Фицджеральд
got a great scheme,” he told her.
“Did you drive your taxi like you said?”
“Yes mamm, but the business was right bad. I waited around in front of all those hotels and theaters an’ nobody ever got in.”
“Nobody?”
“Well, one night there was some drunk fellas they got in, only just as I was gettin’ started my automobile came apart. And another night it was rainin’ and there wasn’t no other taxis and a lady got in because she said she had to go a long ways. But before we got there she made me stop and she got out. She seemed kinda mad and she went walkin’ off in the rain. Mighty proud lot of people they got up in New York.”
“And so you’re going home?” asked Amanthis sympathetically.
“No mamm. I got an idea.” His blue eyes grew narrow. “Has that barber been around here—with hair on his sleeves?”
“No. He’s—he’s gone away.”
“Well, then, first thing is I want to leave this car of mine here with you, if that’s all right. It ain’t the right color for a taxi. To pay for its keep I’d like to have you drive it just as much as you want. ‘Long as you got a hammer an’ nails with you there ain’t much bad that can happen—”
“I’ll take care of it,” interrupted Amanthis, “but where are you going?”
“Southampton. It’s about the most aristocratic watering trough—watering-place there is around here, so that’s where I’m going.”
She sat up in amazement.
“What are you going to do there?”
“Listen.” He leaned toward her confidentially. “Were you serious about wanting to be a New York society girl?”
“Deadly serious.”
“That’s all I wanted to know,” he said inscrutably. “You just wait here on this porch a couple of weeks and—and sleep. And if any barbers come to see you with hair on their sleeves you tell ‘em you’re too sleepy to see ‘em.”
“What then?”
“Then you’ll hear from me. Just tell your old daddy he can do all the judging he wants but you’re goin’ to do some dancin’. Mamm,” he continued decisively, “you talk about society! Before one month I’m goin’ to have you in more society than you ever saw.”
Further than this he would say nothing. His manner conveyed that she was going to be suspended over a perfect pool of gaiety and violently immersed, to an accompaniment of: “Is it gay enough for you, mamm? Shall I let in a little more excitement, mamm?”
“Well,” answered Amanthis, lazily considering, “there are few things for which I’d forego the luxury of sleeping through July and August—but if you’ll write me a letter I’ll—I’ll run up to Southampton.”
Jim snapped his fingers ecstatically.
“More society,” he assured her with all the confidence at his command, “than anybody ever saw.”
Three days later a young man wearing a straw hat that might have been cut from the thatched roof of an English cottage rang the doorbell of the enormous and astounding Madison Harlan house at Southampton. He asked the butler if there were any people in the house between the ages of sixteen and twenty. He was informed that Miss Genevieve Harlan and Mr. Ronald Harlan answered that description and thereupon he handed in a most peculiar card and requested in fetching Georgian that it be brought to their attention.
As a result he was closeted for almost an hour with Mr. Ronald Harlan (who was a student at the Hillkiss School) and Miss Genevieve Harlan (who was not uncelebrated at Southampton dances). When he left he bore a short note in Miss Harlan’s handwriting which he presented together with his peculiar card at the next large estate. It happened to be that of the Clifton Garneaus. Here, as if by magic, the same audience was granted him.
He went on—it was a hot day, and men who could not afford to do so were carrying their coats on the public highway, but Jim, a native of southernmost Georgia, was as fresh and cool at the last house as at the first. He visited ten houses that day. Anyone following him in his course might have taken him to be some curiously gifted book-agent with a much sought-after volume as his stock in trade.
There was something in his unexpected demand for the adolescent members of the family which made hardened butlers lose their critical acumen. As he left each house a close observer might have seen that fascinated eyes followed him to the door and excited voices whispered something which hinted at a future meeting.
The second day he visited twelve houses. Southampton has grown enormously—he might have kept on his round for a week and never seen the same butler twice—but it was only the palatial, the amazing houses which intrigued him.
On the third day he did a thing that many people have been told to do and few have done—he hired a hall. Perhaps the sixteen-to-twenty-year-old people in the enormous houses had told him to. The hall he hired had once been “Mr. Snorkey’s Private Gymnasium for Gentlemen.” It was situated over a garage on the south edge of Southampton and in the days of its prosperity had been, I regret to say, a place where gentlemen could, under Mr. Snorkey’s direction, work off the effects of the night before. It was now abandoned—Mr. Snorkey had given up and gone away and died.
We will now skip three weeks during which time we may assume that the project which had to do with hiring a hall and visiting the two dozen largest houses in Southampton got under way.
The day to which we will skip was the July day on which Mr. James Powell sent a wire to Miss Amanthis Powell saying that if she still aspired to the gaiety of the highest society she should set out for Southampton by the earliest possible train. He himself would meet her at the station.
Jim was no longer a man of leisure, so when she failed to arrive at the time her wire had promised he grew restless. He supposed she was coming on a later train, turned to go back to his—his project—and met her entering the station from the street side.
“Why, how did you—”
“Well,” said Amanthis, “I arrived this morning instead, and I didn’t want to bother you so I found a respectable, not to say dull, boarding-house on the Ocean Road.”
She was quite different from the indolent Amanthis of the porch hammock, he thought. She wore a suit of robins’ egg blue and a rakish young hat with a curling feather—she was attired not unlike those young ladies between sixteen and twenty who of late were absorbing his attention. Yes, she would do very well.
He bowed her profoundly into a taxicab and got in beside her.
“Isn’t it about time you told me your scheme?” she suggested.
“Well, it’s about these society girls up here.” He waved his hand airily. “I know ‘em all.”
“Where are they?”
“Right now they’re with Hugo. You remember—that’s my body-servant.”
“With Hugo!” Her eyes widened. “Why? What’s it all about?”
“Well, I got—I got sort of a school, I guess you’d call it.”
“A school?”
“It’s a sort of Academy. And I’m the head of it. I invented it.”
He flipped a card from his case as though he were shaking down a thermometer.
“Look.”
She took the card. In large lettering it bore the legend
JAMES POWELL; J.M.
“Dice, Brassknuckles and Guitar”
She stared in amazement.
“Dice,