Array The griffin classics - The Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald

“Oh, send somebody—send somebody!” she cried aloud.

Clark Darrow—he would understand; or Joe Ewing; she couldn’t be left here to wander forever—to be frozen, heart, body, and soul. This her—this Sally Carrol! Why, she was a happy thing. She was a happy little girl. She liked warmth and summer and Dixie. These things were foreign—foreign.

“You’re not crying,” something said aloud. “You’ll never cry any more. Your tears would just freeze; all tears freeze up here!”

She sprawled full length on the ice.

“Oh, God!” she faltered.

A long single file of minutes went by, and with a great weariness she felt her eyes closing. Then some one seemed to sit down near her and take her face in warm, soft hands. She looked up gratefully.

“Why, it’s Margery Lee,” she crooned softly to herself. “I knew you’d come.” It really was Margery Lee, and she was just as Sally Carrol had known she would be, with a young, white brow, and wide, welcoming eyes, and a hoop-skirt of some soft material that was quite comforting to rest on.

“Margery Lee.”

It was getting darker now and darker—all those tombstones ought to be repainted, sure enough, only that would spoil ’em, of course. Still, you ought to be able to see ’em.

Then after a succession of moments that went fast and then slow, but seemed to be ultimately resolving themselves into a multitude of blurred rays converging toward a pale-yellow sun, she heard a great cracking noise break her new-found stillness.

It was the sun, it was a light; a torch, and a torch beyond that, and another one, and voices; a face took flesh below the torch, heavy arms raised her, and she felt something on her cheek—it felt wet. Some one had seized her and was rubbing her face with snow. How ridiculous—with snow!

“Sally Carrol! Sally Carrol!”

It was Dangerous Dan McGrew; and two other faces she didn’t know.

“Child, child! We’ve been looking for you two hours! Harry’s half-crazy!”

Things came rushing back into place—the singing, the torches, the great shout of the marching clubs. She squirmed in Patton’s arms and gave a long low cry.

“Oh, I want to get out of here! I’m going back home. Take me home”—her voice rose to a scream that sent a chill to Harry’s heart as he came racing down the next passage—“to-morrow!” she cried with delirious, unrestrained passion—“To-morrow! To-morrow! To-morrow!”

The wealth of golden sunlight poured a quite enervating yet oddly comforting heat over the house where day long it faced the dusty stretch of road. Two birds were making a great to-do in a cool spot found among the branches of a tree next door, and down the street a colored woman was announcing herself melodiously as a purveyor of strawberries. It was April afternoon.

Sally Carrol Happer, resting her chin on her arm, and her arm on an old window-seat, gazed sleepily down over the spangled dust whence the heat waves were rising for the first time this spring. She was watching a very ancient Ford turn a perilous corner and rattle and groan to a jolting stop at the end of the walk. She made no sound, and in a minute a strident familiar whistle rent the air. Sally Carrol smiled and blinked.

“Good mawnin’.”

A head appeared tortuously from under the car-top below.

“’Tain’t mawnin’, Sally Carrol.”

“Sure enough!” she said in affected surprise. “I guess maybe not.”

“What you doin’?”

“Eatin’ green peach. ’Spect to die any minute.”

Clark twisted himself a last impossible notch to get a view of her face.

“Water’s warm as a kettla steam, Sally Carrol. Wanta go swimmin’?”

“Hate to move,” sighed Sally Carrol lazily, “but I reckon so.”

— ◆ —

The Saturday Evening Post (21 February 1920)

In 1915 Horace Tarbox was thirteen years old. In that year he took the examinations for entrance to Princeton University and received the Grade A—excellent—in Cæsar, Cicero, Vergil, Xenophon, Homer, Algebra, Plane Geometry, Solid Geometry, and Chemistry.

Two years later, while George M. Cohan was composing “Over There,” Horace was leading the sophomore class by several lengths and digging out theses on “The Syllogism as an Obsolete Scholastic Form,” and during the battle of Château-Thierry he was sitting at his desk deciding whether or not to wait until his seventeenth birthday before beginning his series of essays on “The Pragmatic Bias of the New Realists.”

After a while some newsboy told him that the war was over, and he was glad, because it meant that Peat Brothers, publishers, would get out their new edition of “Spinoza’s Improvement of the Understanding.” Wars were all very well in their way, made young men self-reliant or something, but Horace felt that he could never forgive the President for allowing a brass band to play under his window on the night of the false armistice, causing him to leave three important sentences out of his thesis on “German Idealism.”

The next year he went up to Yale to take his degree as Master of Arts.

He was seventeen then, tall and slender, with near-sighted gray eyes and an air of keeping himself utterly detached from the mere words he let drop.

“I never feel as though I’m talking to him,” expostulated Professor Dillinger to a sympathetic colleague. “He makes me feel as though I were talking to his representative. I always expect him to say: ‘Well, I’ll ask myself and find out.’”

And then, just as nonchalantly as though Horace Tarbox had been Mr. Beef the butcher or Mr. Hat the haberdasher, life reached in, seized him, handled him, stretched him, and unrolled him like a piece of Irish lace on a Saturday-afternoon bargain-counter.

To move in the literary fashion I should say that this was all because when way back in colonial days the hardy pioneers had come to a bald place in Connecticut and asked of each other, “Now, what shall we build here?” the hardiest one among ’em had answered: “Let’s build a town where theatrical managers can try out musical comedies!” How afterward they founded Yale College there, to try the musical comedies on, is a story every one knows. At any rate one December, “Home James” opened at the Shubert, and all the students encored Marcia Meadow, who sang a song about the Blundering Blimp in the first act and did a shaky, shivery, celebrated dance in the last.

Marcia was nineteen. She didn’t have wings, but audiences agreed generally that she didn’t need them. She was a blonde by natural pigment, and she wore no paint on the streets at high noon. Outside of that she was no better than most women.

It was Charlie Moon who promised her five thousand Pall Malls if she would pay a call on Horace Tarbox, prodigy extraordinary. Charlie was a senior in Sheffield, and he and Horace were first cousins. They liked and pitied each other.

Horace had been particularly busy that night. The failure of the Frenchman Laurier to appreciate the significance of the new realists was preying on his mind. In fact, his only reaction to a low, clear-cut rap at his study was to make him speculate as to whether any rap would have actual existence without an ear there to hear it. He fancied he was verging more and more toward pragmatism. But at that moment, though he did not know it, he was verging with astounding rapidity toward something quite different.

The rap sounded—three seconds leaked by—the rap sounded.

“Come in,” muttered Horace automatically.

He heard the door open and then close, but, bent over his book in the big armchair before the fire, he did not look up.

“Leave it on the bed in the other room,” he said absently.