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
saw less of her than he would have liked. Not that her manner toward him changed—she walked with him often in the mornings, she was always willing to listen to his plans—but after she was taken up by the fashionable her evenings seemed to be monopolized. Several times Jim arrived at her boarding-house to find her out of breath, as if she had just come in at a run, presumably from some festivity in which he had no share.
So as the summer waned he found that one thing was lacking to complete the triumph of his enterprise. Despite the hospitality shown to Amanthis, the doors of Southampton were closed to him. Polite to, or rather, fascinated by him as his pupils were from three to five, after that hour they moved in another world.
His was the position of a golf professional who, though he may fraternize, and even command, on the links, loses his privileges with the sun-down. He may look in the club window but he cannot dance. And, likewise, it was not given to Jim to see his teachings put into effect. He could hear the gossip of the morning after—that was all.
But while the golf professional, being English, holds himself proudly below his patrons, Jim Powell, who “came from a right good family down there—pore though,” lay awake many nights in his hotel bed and heard the music drifting into his window from the Katzbys’ house or the Beach Club, and turned over restlessly and wondered what was the matter. In the early days of his success he had bought himself a dress-suit, thinking that he would soon have a chance to wear it—but it still lay untouched in the box in which it had come from the tailor’s.
Perhaps, he thought, there was some real gap which separated him from the rest. It worried him. One boy in particular, Martin Van Vleck, son of Van Vleck the ash-can King, made him conscious of the gap. Van Vleck was twenty-one, a tutoring-school product who still hoped to enter Yale. Several times Jim had heard him make remarks not intended for Jim’s ear—once in regard to the suit with multiple buttons, again in reference to Jim’s long, pointed shoes. Jim had passed these over.
He knew that Van Vleck was attending the school chiefly to monopolize the time of little Martha Katzby, who was just sixteen and too young to have attention of a boy of twenty-one—especially the attention of Van Vleck, who was so spiritually exhausted by his educational failures that he drew on the rather exhaustible innocence of sixteen.
It was late in September, two days before the Harlan dance which was to be the last and biggest of the season for this younger crowd. Jim, as usual, was not invited. He had hoped that he would be. The two young Harlans, Ronald and Genevieve, had been his first patrons when he arrived at Southampton—and it was Genevieve who had taken such a fancy to Amanthis. To have been at their dance—the most magnificent dance of all—would have crowned and justified the success of the waning summer.
His class, gathering for the afternoon, was loudly anticipating the next day’s revel with no more thought of him than if he had been the family butler. Hugo, standing beside Jim, chuckled suddenly and remarked:
“Look yonder that man Van Vleck. He paralyzed. He been havin’ powerful lotta corn this evenin’.”
Jim turned and stared at Van Vleck, who had linked arms with little Martha Katzby and was saying something to her in a low voice. Jim saw her try to draw away.
He put his whistle to his mouth and blew it.
“All right,” he cried, “Le’s go! Group one tossin’ the drumstick, high an’ zig-zag, group two, test your mouth organs for the Riverfront Shuffle. Promise ‘em sugar! Flatfoots this way! Orchestra—let’s have the Florida Drag-Out played as a dirge.”
There was an unaccustomed sharpness in his voice and the exercises began with a mutter of facetious protest.
With his smoldering grievance directing itself toward Van Vleck, Jim was walking here and there among the groups when Hugo tapped him suddenly on the arm. He looked around. Two participants had withdrawn from the mouth organ institute—one of them was Van Vleck and he was giving a drink out of his flask to fifteen-year-old Ronald Harlan.
Jim strode across the room. Van Vleck turned defiantly as he came up.
“All right,” said Jim, trembling with anger, “you know the rules. You get out!”
The music died slowly away and there was a sudden drifting over in the direction of the trouble. Somebody snickered. An atmosphere of anticipation formed instantly. Despite the fact that they all liked Jim their sympathies were divided—Van Vleck was one of them.
“Get out!” repeated Jim, more quietly.
“Are you talking to me?” inquired Van Vleck coldly.
“Yes.”
“Then you better say ‘sir.’”
“I wouldn’t say ‘sir’ to anybody that’d give a little boy whisky! You get out!”
“Look here!” said Van Vleck furiously. “You’ve butted in once too much. I’ve known Ronald since he was two years old. Ask him if he wants you to tell him what he can do!”
Ronald Harlan, his dignity offended, grew several years older and looked haughtily at Jim.
“Mind your own business!” he said defiantly, albeit a little guiltily.
“Hear that?” demanded Van Vleck. “My God, can’t you see you’re just a servant? Ronald here’d no more think of asking you to his party than he would his bootlegger.”
“Youbettergetout!” cried Jim incoherently.
Van Vleck did not move. Reaching out suddenly, Jim caught his wrist and jerking it behind his back forced his arm upward until Van Vleck bent forward in agony. Jim leaned and picked the flask from the floor with his free hand. Then he signed Hugo to open the hall-door, uttered an abrupt “You step!” and marched his helpless captive out into the hall where he literally threw him downstairs, head over heels bumping from wall to banister, and hurled his flask after him.
Then he reentered his academy, closed the door behind him and stood with his back against it.
“It—it happens to be a rule that nobody drinks while in this Academy.” He paused, looking from face to face, finding there sympathy, awe, disapproval, conflicting emotions. They stirred uneasily. He caught Amanthis’s eye, fancied he saw a faint nod of encouragement and, with almost an effort, went on:
“I just had to throw that fella out an’ you-all know it.” Then he concluded with a transparent affectation of dismissing an unimportant matter—”All right, let’s go! Orchestra—!”
But no one felt exactly like going on. The spontaneity of the proceedings had been violently disturbed. Someone made a run or two on the sliding guitar and several of the girls began whamming at the leer on the punching bags, but Ronald Harlan, followed by two other boys, got their hats and went silently out the door.
Jim and Hugo moved among the groups as usual until a certain measure of routine activity was restored but the enthusiasm was unrecapturable and Jim, shaken and discouraged, considered discontinuing school for the day. But he dared not. If they went home in this mood they might not come back. The whole thing depended on a mood. He must recreate it, he thought frantically—now, at once!
But try as he might, there was little response. He himself was not happy—he could communicate no gaiety to them. They watched his efforts listlessly and, he thought, a little contemptuously.
Then the tension snapped when the door burst suddenly open, precipitating a brace of middle-aged and excited women into the room. No person over twenty-one had ever entered the Academy before—but Van Vleck had gone direct to headquarters. The women were Mrs. Clifton Garneau and Mrs. Poindexter Katzby, two of the most fashionable and, at present, two of the most flurried women in Southampton. They were in search of their daughters as, in these days, so many women continually are.
The business was over in about three minutes.
“And as for you!” cried Mrs.