The Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald. Knowledge house
can’t abuse a man who’d do a thing like this.”
Samuel made no answer.
“It’s simply a dirty filch. There just are skunks like him too big to handle.”
“You’re being paid liberally,” offered Samuel.
“Shut up!” roared McIntyre suddenly. “I want the privilege of talking.” He walked to the door and looked out across the land, the sunny, steaming pasturage that began almost at his feet and ended with the gray-green of the distant mountains. When he turned around his mouth was trembling.
“Do you fellows love Wall Street?” he said hoarsely, “or wherever you do your dirty scheming—” He paused. “I suppose you do. No critter gets so low that he doesn’t sort of love the place he’s worked, where he’s sweated out the best he’s had in him.”
Samuel watched him awkwardly. McIntyre wiped his forehead with a huge blue handkerchief, and continued:
“I reckon this rotten old devil had to have another million. I reckon we’re just a few of the poor beggars he’s blotted out to buy a couple more carriages or something.” He waved his hand toward the door. “I built a house out there when I was seventeen, with these two hands. I took a wife there at twenty-one, added two wings, and with four mangy steers I started out. Forty summers I’ve saw the sun come up over those mountains and drop down red as blood in the evening, before the heat drifted off and the stars came out. I been happy in that house. My boy was born there and he died there, late one spring, in the hottest part of an afternoon like this. Then the wife and I lived there alone like we’d lived before, and sort of tried to have a home, after all, not a real home but nigh it—cause the boy always seemed around close, somehow, and we expected a lot of nights to see him runnin’ up the path to supper.” His voice was shaking so he could hardly speak and he turned again to the door, his gray eyes contracted.
“That’s my land out there,” he said, stretching out his arm, “my land, by God— It’s all I got in the world—and ever wanted.” He dashed his sleeve across his face, and his tone changed as he turned slowly and faced Samuel. “But I suppose it’s got to go when they want it—it’s got to go.”
Samuel had to talk. He felt that in a minute more he would lose his head. So he began, as level-voiced as he could—in the sort of tone he saved for disagreeable duties.
“It’s business, Mr. McIntyre,” he said; “it’s inside the law. Perhaps we couldn’t have bought out two or three of you at any price, but most of you did have a price. Progress demands some things——”
Never had he felt so inadequate, and it was with the greatest relief that he heard hoof-beats a few hundred yards away.
But at his words the grief in McIntyre’s eyes had changed to fury.
“You and your dirty gang of crooks!” he cried. “Not one of you has got an honest love for anything on God’s earth! You’re a herd of money-swine!”
Samuel rose and McIntyre took a step toward him.
“You long-winded dude. You got our land—take that for Peter Carhart!”
He swung from the shoulder quick as lightning and down went Samuel in a heap. Dimly he heard steps in the doorway and knew that some one was holding McIntyre, but there was no need. The rancher had sunk down in his chair, and dropped his head in his hands.
Samuel’s brain was whirring. He realized that the fourth fist had hit him, and a great flood of emotion cried out that the law that had inexorably ruled his life was in motion again. In a half-daze he got up and strode from the room.
The next ten minutes were perhaps the hardest of his life. People talk of the courage of convictions, but in actual life a man’s duty to his family may make a rigid course seem a selfish indulgence of his own righteousness. Samuel thought mostly of his family, yet he never really wavered. That jolt had brought him to.
When he came back in the room there were a lot of worried faces waiting for him, but he didn’t waste any time explaining.
“Gentlemen,” he said, “Mr. McIntyre has been kind enough to convince me that in this matter you are absolutely right, and the Peter Carhart interests absolutely wrong. As far as I am concerned you can keep your ranches to the rest of your days.”
He pushed his way through an astounded gathering, and within a half-hour he had sent two telegrams that staggered the operator into complete unfitness for business; one was to Hamil in San Antonio; one was to Peter Carhart in New York.
Samuel didn’t sleep much that night. He knew that for the first time in his business career he had made a dismal, miserable failure. But some instinct in him, stronger than will, deeper than training, had forced him to do what would probably end his ambitions and his happiness. But it was done and it never occurred to him that he could have acted otherwise.
Next morning two telegrams were waiting for him. The first was from Hamil. It contained three words:
“You blamed idiot!”
The second was from New York:
“Deal off come to New York immediately Carhart.”
Within a week things had happened. Hamil quarrelled furiously and violently defended his scheme. He was summoned to New York, and spent a bad half-hour on the carpet in Peter Carhart’s office. He broke with the Carhart interests in July, and in August Samuel Meredith, at thirty-five years old, was, to all intents, made Carhart’s partner. The fourth fist had done its work.
I suppose that there’s a caddish streak in every man that runs crosswise across his character and disposition and general outlook. With some men it’s secret and we never know it’s there until they strike us in the dark one night. But Samuel’s showed when it was in action, and the sight of it made people see red. He was rather lucky in that, because every time his little devil came up it met a reception that sent it scurrying down below in a sickly, feeble condition. It was the same devil, the same streak that made him order Gilly’s friends off the bed, that made him go inside Marjorie’s house.
If you could run your hand along Samuel Meredith’s jaw you’d feel a lump. He admits he’s never been sure which fist left it there, but he wouldn’t lose it for anything. He says there’s no cad like an old cad, and that sometimes just before making a decision, it’s a great help to stroke his chin. The reporters call it a nervous characteristic, but it’s not that. It’s so he can feel again the gorgeous clarity, the lightning sanity of those four fists.
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F. SCOTT FITZGERALD
Stories 1920–25.
[The texts follow the Cambridge Edition, James L. W. West III, ed., Cambridge University Press 2000–07.]
STORIES 1920–25
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