The Essential Fitzgerald - 45 Short Stories & Novels in One Edition. F. Scott Fitzgerald

Then the grandfather’s clock in the hall outside struck eight, and the memory of the night before came to him. He was out of bed, dressing, like the wind; he must get out of the house before he saw Isabelle. What had seemed a melancholy happening, now seemed a tiresome anticlimax. He was dressed at half past, so he sat down by the window; felt that the sinews of his heart were twisted somewhat more than he had thought. What an ironic mockery the morning seemed!—bright and sunny, and full of the smell of the garden; hearing Mrs. Borge’s voice in the sun-parlor below, he wondered where was Isabelle.

      There was a knock at the door.

      “The car will be around at ten minutes of nine, sir.”

      He returned to his contemplation of the outdoors, and began repeating over and over, mechanically, a verse from Browning, which he had once quoted to Isabelle in a letter:

      “Each life unfulfilled, you see,

      It hangs still, patchy and scrappy;

      We have not sighed deep, laughed free,

      Starved, feasted, despaired—been happy.”

      But his life would not be unfulfilled. He took a sombre satisfaction in thinking that perhaps all along she had been nothing except what he had read into her; that this was her high point, that no one else would ever make her think. Yet that was what she had objected to in him; and Amory was suddenly tired of thinking, thinking!

      “Damn her!” he said bitterly, “she’s spoiled my year!”

      THE SUPERMAN GROWS CARELESS

      On a dusty day in September Amory arrived in Princeton and joined the sweltering crowd of conditioned men who thronged the streets. It seemed a stupid way to commence his upper-class years, to spend four hours a morning in the stuffy room of a tutoring school, imbibing the infinite boredom of conic sections. Mr. Rooney, pander to the dull, conducted the class and smoked innumerable Pall Malls as he drew diagrams and worked equations from six in the morning until midnight.

      “Now, Langueduc, if I used that formula, where would my A point be?”

      Langueduc lazily shifts his six-foot-three of football material and tries to concentrate.

      “Oh—ah—I’m damned if I know, Mr. Rooney.”

      “Oh, why of course, of course you can’t use that formula. That’s what I wanted you to say.”

      “Why, sure, of course.”

      “Do you see why?”

      “You bet—I suppose so.”

      “If you don’t see, tell me. I’m here to show you.”

      “Well, Mr. Rooney, if you don’t mind, I wish you’d go over that again.”

      “Gladly. Now here’s ‘A’…”

      The room was a study in stupidity—two huge stands for paper, Mr. Rooney in his shirt-sleeves in front of them, and slouched around on chairs, a dozen men: Fred Sloane, the pitcher, who absolutely had to get eligible; “Slim” Langueduc, who would beat Yale this fall, if only he could master a poor fifty per cent; McDowell, gay young sophomore, who thought it was quite a sporting thing to be tutoring here with all these prominent athletes.

      “Those poor birds who haven’t a cent to tutor, and have to study during the term are the ones I pity,” he announced to Amory one day, with a flaccid camaraderie in the droop of the cigarette from his pale lips. “I should think it would be such a bore, there’s so much else to do in New York during the term. I suppose they don’t know what they miss, anyhow.” There was such an air of “you and I” about Mr. McDowell that Amory very nearly pushed him out of the open window when he said this. … Next February his mother would wonder why he didn’t make a club and increase his allowance… simple little nut….

      Through the smoke and the air of solemn, dense earnestness that filled the room would come the inevitable helpless cry:

      “I don’t get it! Repeat that, Mr. Rooney!” Most of them were so stupid or careless that they wouldn’t admit when they didn’t understand, and Amory was of the latter. He found it impossible to study conic sections; something in their calm and tantalizing respectability breathing defiantly through Mr. Rooney’s fetid parlors distorted their equations into insoluble anagrams. He made a last night’s effort with the proverbial wet towel, and then blissfully took the exam, wondering unhappily why all the color and ambition of the spring before had faded out. Somehow, with the defection of Isabelle the idea of undergraduate success had loosed its grasp on his imagination, and he contemplated a possible failure to pass off his condition with equanimity, even though it would arbitrarily mean his removal from the Princetonian board and the slaughter of his chances for the Senior Council.

      There was always his luck.

      He yawned, scribbled his honor pledge on the cover, and sauntered from the room.

      “If you don’t pass it,” said the newly arrived Alec as they sat on the window-seat of Amory’s room and mused upon a scheme of wall decoration, “you’re the world’s worst goopher. Your stock will go down like an elevator at the club and on the campus.”

      “Oh, hell, I know it. Why rub it in?”

      “‘Cause you deserve it. Anybody that’d risk what you were in line for ought to be ineligible for Princetonian chairman.”

      “Oh, drop the subject,” Amory protested. “Watch and wait and shut up. I don’t want every one at the club asking me about it, as if I were a prize potato being fattened for a vegetable show.” One evening a week later Amory stopped below his own window on the way to Renwick’s, and, seeing a light, called up:

      “Oh, Tom, any mail?”

      Alec’s head appeared against the yellow square of light.

      “Yes, your result’s here.”

      His heart clamored violently.

      “What is it, blue or pink?”

      “Don’t know. Better come up.”

      He walked into the room and straight over to the table, and then suddenly noticed that there were other people in the room.

      “‘Lo, Kerry.” He was most polite. “Ah, men of Princeton.” They seemed to be mostly friends, so he picked up the envelope marked “Registrar’s Office,” and weighed it nervously.

      “We have here quite a slip of paper.”

      “Open it, Amory.”

      “Just to be dramatic, I’ll let you know that if it’s blue, my name is withdrawn from the editorial board of the Prince, and my short career is over.”

      He paused, and then saw for the first time Ferrenby’s eyes, wearing a hungry look and watching him eagerly. Amory returned the gaze pointedly.

      “Watch my face, gentlemen, for the primitive emotions.”

      He tore it open and held the slip up to the light.

      “Well?”

      “Pink or blue?”

      “Say what it is.”

      “We’re all ears, Amory.”

      “Smile or swear—or something.”

      There was a pause… a small crowd of seconds swept by… then he looked again and another crowd went on into time.

      “Blue as the sky, gentlemen….”

      AFTERMATH

      What Amory did that year from early September to late in the spring was so purposeless and inconsecutive that it seems scarcely worth recording. He was, of course, immediately sorry for what he had lost. His philosophy of success had tumbled down