THE UNCOLLECTED TALES OF 1926-1934 (38 Short Stories in One Edition). F. Scott FitzgeraldЧитать онлайн книгу.
looked around. A stout man of fifty, with a huge face, high forehead, long wide upper lip and great undershot jaw, was taking a driver from a bulging bag. “Why—yes.”
“Mind if I go round with you?”
“Not at all.”
Juan greeted the suggestion with a certain gloomy relief. They were evenly matched, the older man’s steady short shots keeping pace with Juan’s occasional brilliancy. Not until the seventh hole did the conversation rise above the fragmentary boasting and formalized praise which forms the small talk of golf.
“Haven’t seen you around before.”
“I’m just visiting here,” Juan explained, “staying with my cousin, Miss Chandler.”
“Oh yes—know Miss Chandler very well. Nice old snob.”
“What?” inquired Juan.
“Nice old snob, I said. No offence … Your honour, I think.” Not for several holes did Juan venture to comment on his partner’s remark.
“What do you mean when you say she’s a nice old snob?” he inquired with interest.
“Oh, it’s an old quarrel between Miss Chandler and me,” answered the older man brusquely. “She’s an old friend of my wife’s. When we were married and came out to Culpepper Bay for the summer, she tried to freeze us out. Said my wife had no business marrying me. I was an outsider.”
“What did you do?”
“We just let her alone. She came round, but naturally I never had much love for her. She even tried to put her oar in before we were married.” He laughed. “Cora Chandler of Boston—how she used to boss the girls around in those days! At twenty-five she had the sharpest tongue in Back Bay. They were old people there, you know—Emerson and Whittier to dinner and all that. My wife belonged to that crowd too. I was from the Middle West … Oh, too bad. I should have stopped talking. That makes me two up again.”
Suddenly Juan wanted to present his case to this man—not quite as it was, but adorned with a dignity and significance it did not so far possess. It began to round out in his mind as the sempiternal struggle of the poor young man against a snobbish, purse-proud world. This new aspect was comforting, and he put out of his mind the less pleasant realization that, superficially at least, money hadn’t entered into it. He knew in his heart that it was his unfortunate egotism that had repelled Noel, his embarrassment, his absurd attempt to make her jealous with Holly. Only indirectly was his poverty concerned; under different circumstances it might have given a touch of romance.
“I know exactly how you must have felt,” he broke out suddenly as they walked toward the tenth tee. “I haven’t any money and I’m in love with a girl who has—and it seems as if every busybody in the world is determined to keep us apart.”
For a moment Juan believed this. His companion looked at him sharply.
“Does the girl care about you?” he inquired.
“Yes.”
“Well, go after her, young man. All the money in this world hasn’t been made by a long shot.”
“I’m still in college,” said Juan, suddenly taken aback.
“Won’t she wait for you?”
“I don’t know. You see, the pressure’s pretty strong. Her family want her to many a rich man”—his mind visualized the tall well-dressed stranger of this morning and invention soared—“an easterner that’s visiting here, and I’m afraid they’ll all sweep her off her feet. If it’s not this man, it’s the next.”
His friend considered.
“You can’t have everything, you know,” he said presently. “I’m the last man to advise a young man to leave college, especially when I don’t know anything about him or his abilities; but if it’s going to break you up not to get her, you better think about getting to work.”
“I’ve been considering that,” said Juan frowning. The idea was ten seconds old in his mind.
“All girls are crazy now, anyhow,” broke out the older man. “They begin to think of men at fifteen, and by the time they’re seventeen they run off with the chauffeur next door.”
“That’s true,” agreed Juan absently. He was absorbed in the previous suggestion. “The trouble is that I don’t live in Boston. If I left college I’d want to be near her, because it might be a few months before I’d be able to support her. And I don’t know how I’d go about getting a position in Boston.”
“If you’re Cora Chandler’s cousin, that oughtn’t to be difficult. She knows everybody in town. And the girl’s family will probably help you out, once you’ve got her—some of them are fools enough for anything in these crazy days.”
“I wouldn’t like that.”
“Rich girls can’t live on air,” said the older man grimly.
They played for a while in silence. Suddenly, as they approached a green, Juan’s companion turned to him frowning.
“Look here, young man,” he said, “I don’t know whether you are really thinking of leaving college or whether I’ve just put the idea in your head. If I have, forget it. Go home and talk it over with your family. Do what they tell you to.”
“My father’s dead.”
“Well, then ask your mother. She’s got your best interest at heart.”
His attitude had noticeably stiffened, as if he were sorry he had become even faintly involved in Juan’s problem. He guessed that there was something solid in the boy, but he suspected his readiness to confide in strangers and his helplessness about getting a job. Something was lacking—not confidence, exactly—“It might be a few months before I was able to support her”—but something stronger, fiercer, more external. When they walked together into the caddie house he shook hands with him and was about to turn away, when impulse impelled him to add one word more.
“If you decide to try Boston come and see me,” he said. He pressed a card into Juan’s hand. “Good-bye. Good luck. Remember, a woman’s like a street car——”
He walked into the locker room. After paying his caddie, Juan glanced down at the card which he still held in his hand.
“Harold Garneau,” it read, “23-7 State Street.”
A moment later Juan was walking nervously and hurriedly from the grounds of the Culpepper Club, casting no glance behind.
V.
One month later San Juan Chandler arrived in Boston and took an inexpensive room in a small downtown hotel. In his pocket was two hundred dollars in cash and an envelope full of liberty bonds aggregating fifteen hundred dollars more—the whole being a fund which had been started by his father when he was born, to give him his chance in life. Not without argument had he come into possession of this—not without tears had his decision to abandon his last year at college been approved by his mother. He had not told her everything; simply that he had an advantageous offer of a position in Boston; the rest she guessed and was tactfully silent. As a matter of fact, he had neither a position nor a plan, but he was twenty-one now, with the blemishes of youth departed for ever. One thing Juan knew—he was going to marry Noel Garneau. The sting and hurt and shame of that Sunday morning ran through his dreams, stronger than any doubts he might have felt, stronger even than the romantic boyish love for her that had blossomed one dry, still Montana night. That was still there, but locked apart; what had happened later overlay it, muffled it. It was necessary now to his pride, his self-respect, his very existence, that he have her, in order to wipe out his memory of the day on which he had grown three years.
He hadn’t seen her since. The following morning he had left Culpepper