Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald (Illustrated) (196 page)

Now during the Christmas holidays of 1919 there took place in Toledo, counting only the people with the italicized the, forty-one dinner parties, sixteen dances, six luncheons, male and female, twelve teas, four stag dinners, two weddings, and thirteen bridge parties. It was the cumulative effect of all this that moved Perry Parkhurst on the twenty-ninth day of December to a decision.

This Medill girl would marry him and she wouldn’t marry him. She was having such a good time that she hated to take such a definite step. Meanwhile, their secret engagement had got so long that it seemed as if any day it might break off of its own weight. A little man named Warburton, who knew it all, persuaded Perry to superman her, to get a marriage license and go up to the Medill house and tell her she’d have to marry him at once or call it off forever. So he presented himself, his heart, his license, and his ultimatum, and within five minutes they were in the midst of a violent quarrel, a burst of sporadic open fighting such as occurs near the end of all long wars and engagements. It brought about one of those ghastly lapses in which two people who are in love pull up sharp, look at each other coolly and think it’s all been a mistake. Afterward they usually kiss wholesomely and assure the other person it was all their fault. Say it all was my fault! Say it was! I want to hear you say it!

But while reconciliation was trembling in the air, while each was, in a measure, stalling it off, so that they might the more voluptuously and sentimentally enjoy it when it came, they were permanently interrupted by a twenty-minute phone call for Betty from a garrulous aunt. At the end of eighteen minutes Perry Parkhurst, urged on by pride and suspicion and injured dignity, put on his long fur coat, picked up his light brown soft hat, and stalked out the door.

“It’s all over,” he muttered brokenly as he tried to jam his car into first. “It’s all over — if I have to choke you for an hour, damn you!”. The last to the car, which had been standing some time and was quite cold.

He drove downtown — that is, he got into a snow rut that led him downtown. He sat slouched down very low in his seat, much too dispirited to care where he went.

In front of the Clarendon Hotel he was hailed from the sidewalk by a bad man named Baily, who had big teeth and lived at the hotel and had never been in love.

“Perry,” said the bad man softly when the roadster drew up beside him at the curb, “I’ve got six quarts of the doggonedest still champagne you ever tasted. A third of it’s yours, Perry, if you’ll come up-stairs and help Martin Macy and me drink it.”

“Baily,” said Perry tensely, “I’ll drink your champagne. I’ll drink every drop of it, I don’t care if it kills me.”

“Shut up, you nut!” said the bad man gently. “They don’t put wood alcohol in champagne. This is the stuff that proves the world is more than six thousand years old. It’s so ancient that the cork is petrified. You have to pull it with a stone drill.”

“Take me up-stairs,” said Perry moodily. “If that cork sees my heart it’ll fall out from pure mortification.”

The room up-stairs was full of those innocent hotel pictures of little girls eating apples and sitting in swings and talking to dogs. The other decorations were neckties and a pink man reading a pink paper devoted to ladies in pink tights.

“When you have to go into the highways and byways —  — “ said the pink man, looking reproachfully at Baily and Perry.

“Hello, Martin Macy,” said Perry shortly, “where’s this stone-age champagne?”

“What’s the rush? This isn’t an operation, understand. This is a party.”

Perry sat down dully and looked disapprovingly at all the neckties.

Baily leisurely opened the door of a wardrobe and brought out six handsome bottles.

“Take off that darn fur coat!” said Martin Macy to Perry. “Or maybe you’d like to have us open all the windows.”

“Give me champagne,” said Perry.

“Going to the Townsends’ circus ball to-night?”

“Am not!”

“‘Vited?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Why not go?”

“Oh, I’m sick of parties,” exclaimed Perry. “I’m sick of ‘em. I’ve been to so many that I’m sick of ‘em.”

“Maybe you’re going to the Howard Tates’ party?”

“No, I tell you; I’m sick of ‘em.”

“Well,” said Macy consolingly, “the Tates’ is just for college kids anyways.”

“I tell you —  — “

“I thought you’d be going to one of ‘em anyways. I see by the papers you haven’t missed a one this Christmas.”

“Hm,” grunted Perry morosely.

He would never go to any more parties. Classical phrases played in his mind — that side of his life was closed, closed. Now when a man says “closed, closed” like that, you can be pretty sure that some woman has double-closed him, so to speak. Perry was also thinking that other classical thought, about how cowardly suicide is. A noble thought that one — warm and inspiring. Think of all the fine men we should lose if suicide were not so cowardly!

An hour later was six o’clock, and Perry had lost all resemblance to the young man in the liniment advertisement. He looked like a rough draft for a riotous cartoon. They were singing — an impromptu song of Baily’s improvisation:

     ”One Lump Perry, the parlor snake,
     Famous through the city for the way he drinks his tea;
       Plays with it, toys with it
       Makes no noise with it,
     Balanced on a napkin on his well-trained knee — “

“Trouble is,” said Perry, who had just banged his hair with Baily’s comb and was tying an orange tie round it to get the effect of Julius Caesar, “that you fellas can’t sing worth a damn. Soon’s I leave the air and start singing tenor you start singin’ tenor too.”

“‘M a natural tenor,” said Macy gravely. “Voice lacks cultivation, tha’s all. Gotta natural voice, m’aunt used say. Naturally good singer.”

“Singers, singers, all good singers,” remarked Baily, who was at the telephone. “No, not the cabaret; I want night egg. I mean some dog-gone clerk ‘at’s got food — food! I want —  — “

“Julius Caesar,” announced Perry, turning round from the mirror. “Man of iron will and stern ‘termination.”

“Shut up!” yelled Baily. “Say, iss Mr. Baily Sen’ up enormous supper.
Use y’own judgment. Right away.”

He connected the receiver and the hook with some difficulty, and then with his lips closed and an expression of solemn intensity in his eyes went to the lower drawer of his dresser and pulled it open.

“Lookit!” he commanded. In his hands he held a truncated garment of pink gingham.

“Pants,” he exclaimed gravely. “Lookit!”

This was a pink blouse, a red tie, and a Buster Brown collar.

“Lookit!” he repeated. “Costume for the Townsends’ circus ball. I’m li’l’ boy carries water for the elephants.”

Perry was impressed in spite of himself.

“I’m going to be Julius Caesar,” he announced after a moment of concentration.

“Thought you weren’t going!” said Macy.

“Me? Sure I’m goin’, Never miss a party. Good for the nerves — like celery.”

“Caesar!” scoffed Baily. “Can’t be Caesar! He is not about a circus.
Caesar’s Shakespeare. Go as a clown.”

Perry shook his head.

“Nope; Caesar,”

“Caesar?”

“Sure. Chariot.”

Light dawned on Baily.

“That’s right. Good idea.”

Perry looked round the room searchingly.

“You lend me a bathrobe and this tie,” he said finally. Baily considered.

“No good.”

“Sure, tha’s all I need. Caesar was a savage. They can’t kick if I come as Caesar, if he was a savage.”

“No,” said Baily, shaking his head slowly. “Get a costume over at a costumer’s. Over at Nolak’s.”

“Closed up.”

“Find out.”

After a puzzling five minutes at the phone a small, weary voice managed to convince Perry that it was Mr. Nolak speaking, and that they would remain open until eight because of the Townsends’ ball. Thus assured, Perry ate a great amount of filet mignon and drank his third of the last bottle of champagne. At eight-fifteen the man in the tall hat who stands in front of the Clarendon found him trying to start his roadster.

“Froze up,” said Perry wisely. “The cold froze it. The cold air.”

“Froze, eh?”

“Yes. Cold air froze it.”

“Can’t start it?”

“Nope. Let it stand here till summer. One those hot ole August days’ll thaw it out awright.”

“Goin’ let it stand?”

“Sure. Let ‘er stand. Take a hot thief to steal it. Gemme taxi.”

The man in the tall hat summoned a taxi.

“Where to, mister?”

“Go to Nolak’s — costume fella.”

II

Mrs. Nolak was short and ineffectual looking, and on the cessation of the world war had belonged for a while to one of the new nationalities. Owing to unsettled European conditions she had never since been quite sure what she was. The shop in which she and her husband performed their daily stint was dim and ghostly, and peopled with suits of armor and Chinese mandarins, and enormous papier-mâché birds suspended from the ceiling. In a vague background many rows of masks glared eyelessly at the visitor, and there were glass cases full of crowns and scepters, and jewels and enormous stomachers, and paints, and crape hair, and wigs of all colors.

When Perry ambled into the shop Mrs. Nolak was folding up the last troubles of a strenuous day, so she thought, in a drawer full of pink silk stockings.

“Something for you?” she queried pessimistically. “Want costume of
Julius Hur, the charioteer.”

Mrs. Nolak was sorry, but every stitch of charioteer had been rented long ago. Was it for the Townsends’ circus ball?

It was.

“Sorry,” she said, “but I don’t think there’s anything left that’s really circus.”

This was an obstacle.

“Hm,” said Perry. An idea struck him suddenly. “If you’ve got a piece of canvas I could go’s a tent.”

“Sorry, but we haven’t anything like that. A hardware store is where you’d have to go to. We have some very nice Confederate soldiers.”

“No. No soldiers.”

“And I have a very handsome king.”

He shook his head.

“Several of the gentlemen” she continued hopefully, “are wearing stovepipe hats and swallow-tail coats and going as ringmasters — but we’re all out of tall hats. I can let you have some crape hair for a mustache.”

“Want somep’n ‘stinctive.”

“Something — let’s see. Well, we have a lion’s head, and a goose, and a camel — “

“Camel?” The idea seized Perry’s imagination, gripped it fiercely.

“Yes, but It needs two people.”

“Camel, That’s the idea. Lemme see it.”

The camel was produced from his resting place on a top shelf. At first glance he appeared to consist entirely of a very gaunt, cadaverous head and a sizable hump, but on being spread out he was found to possess a dark brown, unwholesome-looking body made of thick, cottony cloth.

“You see it takes two people,” explained Mrs. Nolak, holding the camel in frank admiration. “If you have a friend he could be part of it. You see there’s sorta pants for two people. One pair is for the fella in front, and the other pair for the fella in back. The fella in front does the lookin’ out through these here eyes, an’ the fella in back he’s just gotta stoop over an’ folla the front fella round.”

“Put it on,” commanded Perry.

Obediently Mrs. Nolak put her tabby-cat face inside the camel’s head and turned it from side to side ferociously.

Perry was fascinated.

“What noise does a camel make?”

“What?” asked Mrs. Nolak as her face emerged, somewhat smudgy. “Oh, what noise? Why, he sorta brays.”

“Lemme see it in a mirror.”

Before a wide mirror Perry tried on the head and turned from side to side appraisingly. In the dim light the effect was distinctly pleasing. The camel’s face was a study in pessimism, decorated with numerous abrasions, and it must be admitted that his coat was in that state of general negligence peculiar to camels — in fact, he needed to be cleaned and pressed — but distinctive he certainly was. He was majestic. He would have attracted attention in any gathering, if only by his melancholy cast of feature and the look of hunger lurking round his shadowy eyes.

“You see you have to have two people,” said Mrs. Nolak again.

Perry tentatively gathered up the body and legs and wrapped them about him, tying the hind legs as a girdle round his waist. The effect on the whole was bad. It was even irreverent — like one of those mediaeval pictures of a monk changed into a beast by the ministrations of Satan. At the very best the ensemble resembled a humpbacked cow sitting on her haunches among blankets.

“Don’t look like anything at all,” objected Perry gloomily.

“No,” said Mrs. Nolak; “you see you got to have two people.”

A solution flashed upon Perry.

“You got a date to-night?”

“Oh, I couldn’t possibly —  — “

“Oh, come on,” said Perry encouragingly. “Sure you can! Here! Be good sport, and climb into these hind legs.”

With difficulty he located them, and extended their yawning depths ingratiatingly. But Mrs. Nolak seemed loath. She backed perversely away.

“Oh, no —  — “

“C’mon! You can be the front if you want to. Or we’ll flip a coin.”

“Make it worth your while.”

Mrs. Nolak set her lips firmly together.

“Now you just stop!” she said with no coyness implied. “None of the gentlemen ever acted up this way before. My husband —  — “

“You got a husband?” demanded Perry. “Where is he?”

“He’s home.”

“Wha’s telephone number?”

After considerable parley he obtained the telephone number pertaining to the Nolak penates and got into communication with that small, weary voice he had heard once before that day. But Mr. Nolak, though taken off his guard and somewhat confused by Perry’s brilliant flow of logic, stuck staunchly to his point. He refused firmly, but with dignity, to help out Mr. Parkhurst in the capacity of back part of a camel.

Having rung off, or rather having been rung off on, Perry sat down on a three-legged stool to think it over. He named over to himself those friends on whom he might call, and then his mind paused as Betty Medill’s name hazily and sorrowfully occurred to him. He had a sentimental thought. He would ask her. Their love affair was over, but she could not refuse this last request. Surely it was not much to ask — to help him keep up his end of social obligation for one short night. And if she insisted, she could be the front part of the camel and he would go as the back. His magnanimity pleased him. His mind even turned to rosy-colored dreams of a tender reconciliation inside the camel — there hidden away from all the world….