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
Katzby, “you have colored men around! You have colored girls hidden! I’m going to the police!”
Not content with herding their own daughters from the room, they insisted on the exodus of their friends’ daughters. Jim was not a little touched when several of them—including even little Martha Katzby, before she was snatched fiercely away by her mother—came up and shook hands with him. But they were all going, haughtily, regretfully or with shame-faced mutters of apology.
“Good-by,” he told them wistfully. “In the morning I’ll send you the money that’s due you.”
And, after all, they were not sorry to go. Outside, the sound of their starting motors, the triumphant put-put of their cut-outs cutting the warm September air, was a jubilant sound—a sound of youth and hopes high as the sun. Down to the ocean, to roll in the waves and forget—forget him and their discomfort at his humiliation.
They were gone—he was alone with Hugo in the room. He sat down suddenly with his face in his hands.
“Hugo,” he said huskily. “They don’t want us up here.”
“Don’t you care,” said a voice.
He looked up to see Amanthis standing beside him.
“You better go with them,” he told her. “You better not be seen here with me.”
“Why?”
“Because you’re in society now and I’m no better to those people than a servant. You’re in society—I fixed that up. You better go or they won’t invite you to any of their dances.”
“They won’t anyhow, Jim,” she said gently. “They didn’t invite me to the one tomorrow night.”
He looked up indignantly.
“They didn’t?”
She shook her head.
“I’ll make ‘em!” he said wildly. “I’ll tell ‘em they got to. I’ll—I’ll—”
She came close to him with shining eyes.
“Don’t you mind, Jim,” she soothed him. “Don’t you mind. They don’t matter. We’ll have a party of our own tomorrow—just you and I.”
“I come from right good folks,” he said, defiantly. “Pore though.”
She laid her hand softly on his shoulder.
“I understand. You’re better than all of them put together, Jim.”
He got up and went to the window and stared out mournfully into the late afternoon.
“I reckon I should have let you sleep in that hammock.”
She laughed.
“I’m awfully glad you didn’t.”
He turned and faced the room, and his face was dark.
“Sweep up and lock up, Hugo,” he said, his voice trembling. “The summer’s over and we’re going down home.”
Autumn had come early. Jim Powell woke next morning to find his room cool, and the phenomenon of frosted breath in September absorbed him for a moment to the exclusion of the day before. Then the lines of his face drooped with unhappiness as he remembered the humiliation which had washed the cheery glitter from the summer. There was nothing left for him except to go back where he was known, where under no provocation were such things said to white people as had been said to him here.
After breakfast a measure of his customary light-heartedness returned. He was a child of the South—brooding was alien to his nature. He could conjure up an injury only a certain number of times before it faded into the great vacancy of the past.
But when, from force of habit, he strolled over to his defunct establishment, already as obsolete as Snorkey’s late sanitarium, melancholy again dwelt in his heart. Hugo was there, a specter of despair, deep in the lugubrious blues amidst his master’s broken hopes.
Usually a few words from Jim were enough to raise him to an inarticulate ecstasy, but this morning there were no words to utter. For two months Hugo had lived on a pinnacle of which he had never dreamed. He had enjoyed his work simply and passionately, arriving before school hours and lingering long after Mr. Powell’s pupils had gone.
The day dragged toward a not-too-promising night. Amanthis did not appear and Jim wondered forlornly if she had not changed her mind about dining with him that night. Perhaps it would be better if she were not seen with them. But then, he reflected dismally, no one would see them anyhow—everybody was going to the big dance at the Harlans’ house.
When twilight threw unbearable shadows into the school hall he locked it up for the last time, took down the sign “James Powell; J. M., Dice, Brassknuckles and Guitar,” and went back to his hotel. Looking over his scrawled accounts he saw that there was another month’s rent to pay on his school and some bills for windows broken and new equipment that had hardly been used. Jim had lived in state, and he realized that financially he would have nothing to show for the summer after all.
When he had finished he took his new dress-suit out of its box and inspected it, running his hand over the satin of the lapels and lining. This, at least, he owned and perhaps in Tarleton somebody would ask him to a party where he could wear it.
“Shucks!” he said scoffingly. “It was just a no account old academy, anyhow. Some of those boys round the garage down home could of beat it all hollow.”
Whistling “Jeanne of Jelly-bean Town” to a not-dispirited rhythm Jim encased himself in his first dress-suit and walked downtown.
“Orchids,” he said to the clerk. He surveyed his purchase with some pride. He knew that no girl at the Harlan dance would wear anything lovelier than these exotic blossoms that leaned languorously backward against green ferns.
In a taxicab, carefully selected to look like a private car, he drove to Amanthis’s boarding-house. She came down wearing a rose-colored evening dress into which the orchids melted like colors into a sunset.
“I reckon we’ll go to the Casino Hotel,” he suggested, “unless you got some other place—”
At their table, looking out over the dark ocean, his mood became a contended sadness. The windows were shut against the cool but the orchestra played “Kalula” and “South Sea Moon” and for awhile, with her young loveliness opposite him, he felt himself to be a romantic participant in the life around him. They did not dance, and he was glad—it would have reminded him of that other brighter and more radiant dance to which they could not go.
After dinner they took a taxi and followed the sandy roads for an hour, glimpsing the now starry ocean through the casual trees.
“I want to thank you,” she said, “for all you’ve done for me, Jim.”
“That’s all right—we Powells ought to stick together.”
“What are you going to do?”
“I’m going to Tarleton tomorrow.”
“I’m sorry,” she said softly. “Are you going to drive down?”
“I got to. I got to get the car south because I couldn’t get what she was worth by sellin’ it. You don’t suppose anybody’s stole my car out of your barn?” he asked in sudden alarm.
She repressed a smile.
“No.”
“I’m sorry about this—about you,” he went on huskily, “and—and I would like to have gone to just one of their dances. You shouldn’t of stayed with me yesterday. Maybe it kept ‘em from asking you.”
“Jim,” she suggested eagerly, “let’s go and stand outside and listen to their old music. We don’t care.”
“They’ll