The Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald. Knowledge house
holiday. You’ve been talking about New York, and I want you to go down there. Tell some of your friends at Yale and the other colleges and they’ll ask you to the prom or something. That’ll be nice. You’ll have a good time.”
He sat down abruptly in his chair and gave vent to a long sigh. Yanci folded up the check and tucked it into the low bosom of her dress.
“Well,” she drawled softly with a return to her usual manner, “you’re a perfect lamb to be so sweet about it, but I don’t want to be horribly extravagant.”
Her father did not answer. He gave another little sigh and relaxed sleepily into his chair.
“Of course I do want to go,” went on Yanci.
Still her father was silent. She wondered if he were asleep.
“Are you asleep?” she demanded, cheerfully now. She bent toward him; then she stood up and looked at him.
“Father,” she said uncertainly.
Her father remained motionless; the ruddy color had melted suddenly out of his face.
“Father!”
It occurred to her—and at the thought she grew cold, and a brassière of iron clutched at her breast—that she was alone in the room. After a frantic instant she said to herself that her father was dead.
V
Yanci judged herself with inevitable gentleness—judged herself very much as a mother might judge a wild, spoiled child. She was not hard-minded, nor did she live by any ordered and considered philosophy of her own. To such a catastrophe as the death of her father her immediate reaction was a hysterical self-pity. The first three days were something of a nightmare; but sentimental civilization, being as infallible as Nature in healing the wounds of its more fortunate children, had inspired a certain Mrs. Oral, whom Yanci had always loathed, with a passionate interest in all such crises. To all intents and purposes Mrs. Oral buried Tom Bowman. The morning after his death Yanci had wired her maternal aunt in Chicago, but as yet that undemonstrative and well-to-do lady had sent no answer.
All day long, for four days, Yanci sat in her room upstairs, hearing steps come and go on the porch, and it merely increased her nervousness that the doorbell had been disconnected. This by order of Mrs. Oral! Doorbells were always disconnected! After the burial of the dead the strain relaxed. Yanci, dressed in her new black, regarded herself in the pier glass, and then wept because she seemed to herself very sad and beautiful. She went downstairs and tried to read a moving-picture magazine, hoping that she would not be alone in the house when the winter dark came down just after four.
This afternoon Mrs. Oral had said carpe diem to the maid, and Yanci was just starting for the kitchen to see whether she had yet gone when the reconnected bell rang suddenly through the house. Yanci started. She waited a minute, then went to the door. It was Scott Kimberly.
“I was just going to inquire for you,” he said.
“Oh! I’m much better, thank you,” she responded with the quiet dignity that seemed suited to her role.
They stood there in the hall awkwardly, each reconstructing the half-facetious, half-sentimental occasion on which they had last met. It seemed such an irreverent prelude to such a somber disaster. There was no common ground for them now, no gap that could be bridged by a slight reference to their mutual past, and there was no foundation on which he could adequately pretend to share her sorrow.
“Won’t you come in?” she said, biting her lip nervously. He followed her to the sitting room and sat beside her on the lounge. In another minute, simply because he was there and alive and friendly, she was crying on his shoulder.
“There, there!” he said, putting his arm behind her and patting her shoulder idiotically. “There, there, there!”
He was wise enough to attribute no ulterior significance to her action. She was overstrained with grief and loneliness and sentiment; almost any shoulder would have done as well. For all the biological thrill to either of them he might have been a hundred years old. In a minute she sat up.
“I beg your pardon,” she murmured brokenly. “But it’s—it’s so dismal in this house today.”
“I know just how you feel, Yanci.”
“Did I—did I—get—tears on your coat?”
In tribute to the tenseness of the incident they both laughed hysterically, and with the laughter she momentarily recovered her propriety.
“I don’t know why I should have chosen you to collapse on,” she wailed. “I really don’t just go round doing it in-indiscriminately on anyone who comes in.”
“I consider it a—a compliment,” he responded soberly, “and I can understand the state you’re in.” Then, after a pause, “Have you any plans?”
She shook her head.
“Va-vague ones,” she muttered between little gasps. “I tho-ought I’d go down and stay with my aunt in Chicago awhile.”
“I should think that’d be best—much the best thing.” Then, because he could think of nothing else to say, he added, “Yes, very much the best thing.”
“What are you doing—here in town?” she inquired, taking in her breath in minute gasps and dabbing at her eyes with a handkerchief.
“Oh, I’m here with—with the Rogerses. I’ve been here.”
“Hunting?”
“No, I’ve just been here.”
He did not tell her that he had stayed over on her account. She might think it fresh.
“I see,” she said. She didn’t see.
“I want to know if there’s any possible thing I can do for you, Yanci. Perhaps go downtown for you, or do some errands—anything. Maybe you’d like to bundle up and get a bit of air. I could take you out to drive in your car some night, and no one would see you.”
He clipped his last word short as the inadvertency of this suggestion dawned on him. They stared at each other with horror in their eyes.
“Oh, no, thank you!” she cried. “I really don’t want to drive.”
To his relief the outer door opened and an elderly lady came in. It was Mrs. Oral. Scott rose immediately and moved backward toward the door.
“If you’re sure there isn’t anything I can do——”
Yanci introduced him to Mrs. Oral; then leaving the elder woman by the fire walked with him to the door. An idea had suddenly occurred to her.
“Wait a minute.”
She ran up the front stairs and returned immediately with a slip of pink paper in her hand.
“Here’s something I wish you’d do,” she said. “Take this to the First National Bank and have it cashed for me. You can leave the money here for me any time.”
Scott took out his wallet and opened it.
“Suppose I cash it for you now,” he suggested.
“Oh, there’s no hurry.”
“But I may as well.” He drew out three new one-hundred-dollar bills and gave them to her.
“That’s awfully sweet of you,” said Yanci.
“Not at all. May I come in and see you next time I come West?”
“I wish you would.”
“Then I will. I’m going East tonight.”
The door shut him out into the snowy dusk and Yanci returned to Mrs. Oral. Mrs. Oral had come to discuss plans.
“And