Basil and Cleopatra
by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Wherever she was, became a beautiful and enchanted place to Basil, but he did not think of it that way. He thought the fascination was inherent in the locality, and long afterward a commonplace street or the mere name of a city would exude a peculiar glow, a sustained sound, that struck his soul alert with delight. In her presence he was too absorbed to notice his surroundings; so that her absence never made them empty, but, rather, sent him seeking for her through haunted rooms and gardens that he had never really seen before.
This time, as usual, he saw only the expression of her face, the mouth that gave an attractive interpretation of any emotion she felt or pretended to feel—oh, invaluable mouth—and the rest of her, new as a peach and old as sixteen. He was almost unconscious that they stood in a railroad station and entirely unconscious that she had just glanced over his shoulder and fallen in love with another young man. Turning to walk with the rest to the car, she was already acting for the stranger; no less so because her voice was pitched for Basil and she clung to him, squeezing his arm.
Had Basil noticed this other young man that the train discharged he would merely have been sorry for him—as he had been sorry for the wretched people in the villages along the railroad and for his fellow travelers—they were not entering Yale in a fortnight nor were they about to spend three days in the same town with Miss Erminie Gilberte Labouisse Bibble. There was something dense, hopeless and a little contemptible about them all.
Basil had come to visit here because Erminie Bibble was visiting here.
On the sad eve of her departure from his native Western city a month before, she had said, with all the promise one could ask in her urgent voice:
“If you know a boy in Mobile, why don’t you make him invite you down when I’ll be there?”
He had followed this suggestion. And now with the soft, unfamiliar Southern city actually flowing around him, his excitement led him to believe that Fat Gaspar’s car floated off immediately they entered it. A voice from the curb came as a surprise:
“Hi, Bessie Belle. Hi, William. How you all?”
The newcomer was tall and lean and a year or so older than Basil. He wore a white linen suit and a panama hat, under which burned fierce, undefeated Southern eyes.
“Why, Littleboy Le Moyne!” exclaimed Miss Cheever. “When did you get home?”
“Jus’ now, Bessie Belle. Saw you lookin’ so fine and pretty, had to come and see closer.”
He was introduced to Minnie and Basil.
“Drop you somewhere, Littleboy?” asked Fat—on his native heath, William.
“Why—” Le Moyne hesitated. “You’re very kind, but the man ought to be here with the car.”
“Jump in.”
Le Moyne swung his bag on top of Basil’s and with courteous formality got in the back seat beside them. Basil caught Minnie’s eye and she smiled quickly back, as if to say, “This is too bad, but it’ll soon be over.”
“Do you happen to come from New Orleans, Miss Bibble?” asked Le Moyne.
“Sure do.”
“’Cause I just came from there and they told me one of their mos’ celebrated heartbreakers was visiting up here, and meanwhile her suitors were shooting themselves all over the city. That’s the truth. I used to help pick ’em up myself sometimes when they got littering the streets.”
“This must be Mobile Bay on the left,” Basil thought; “Down Mobile,” and the Dixie moonlight and darky stevedores singing. The houses on either side of the street were gently faded behind proud, protecting vines; there had been crinolines on these balconies, and guitars by night in these broken gardens.
It was so warm; the voices were so sure they had time to say everything—even Minnie’s voice, answering the banter of the youth with the odd nickname, seemed slower and lazier—he had scarcely ever thought of her as a Southern girl before. They stopped at a large gate where flickers of a yellow house showed through luscious trees. Le Moyne got out.
“I certainly hope you both enjoy your visit here. If you’ll permit me I’ll call around and see if there’s anything I can do to add to your pleasure.” He swooped his panama. “I bid you good day.”
As they started off, Bessie Belle turned around and smiled at Minnie.
“Didn’t I tell you?” she demanded.
“I guessed it in the station, before he came up to the car,” said Minnie. “Something told me that was him.”
“Did you think he was good-looking?”
“He was divine,” Minnie said.
“Of course he’s always gone with an older crowd.”
To Basil, this prolonged discussion seemed a little out of place. After all, the young man was simply a local Southerner who lived here; add to that, that he went with an older crowd, and it seemed that his existence was being unnecessarily insisted upon.
But now Minnie turned to him, said, “Basil,” wriggled invitingly and folded her hands in a humble, expectant way that invariably caused disturbances in his heart.
“I loved your letters,” she said.
“You might have answered them.”
“I haven’t had a minute, Basil. I visited in Chicago and then in Nashville. I haven’t even been home.” She lowered her voice. “Father and mother are getting a divorce, Basil. Isn’t that awful?”
He was startled; then, after a moment, he adjusted the idea to her and she became doubly poignant; because of its romantic connection with her, the thought of divorce would never shock him again.
“That’s why I didn’t write. But I’ve thought of you so much. You’re the best friend I have, Basil. You always understand.”
This was decidedly not the note upon which they had parted in St. Paul. A dreadful rumor that he hadn’t intended to mention rose to his lips.
“Who is this fellow Bailey you met at Lake Forest?” he inquired lightly.
“Buzz Bailey!” Her big eyes opened in surprise. “He’s very attractive and a divine dancer, but we’re just friends.” She frowned. “I bet Connie Davies has been telling tales in St. Paul. Honestly, I’m so sick of girls that, just out of jealousy or nothing better to do, sit around and criticize you if you have a good time.”
He was convinced now that something had occurred in Lake Forest, but he concealed the momentary pang from Minnie.
“Anyhow, you’re a fine one to talk.” She smiled suddenly. “I guess everybody knows how fickle you are, Mr. Basil Duke Lee.”
Generally such an implication is considered flattering, but the lightness, almost the indifference, with which she spoke increased his alarm—and then suddenly the bomb exploded.
“You needn’t worry about Buzz Bailey. At present I’m absolutely heart-whole and fancy free.”
Before he could even comprehend the enormity of what she had said, they stopped at Bessie Belle Cheever’s door and the two girls ran up the steps, calling back, “We’ll see you this afternoon.”
Mechanically Basil climbed into the front seat beside his host.
“Going out for freshman football, Basil?” William asked.
“What? Oh, sure. If I can get off my two conditions.” There was no if in his heart; it was the greatest ambition of his life.
“You’ll probably make the freshman team easy. That fellow Littleboy Le Moyne you just met is going to Princeton this fall. He played end at V.M.I.”
“Where’d he get that crazy name?”
“Why, his family always called him that and everybody picked it up.” After a moment he added, “He asked them to the country-club dance with him tonight.”
“When did he?” Basil demanded in surprise.
“Right then. That’s what they were talking about. I meant to ask them and I was just leading up to it gradually, but he stepped in before I could get a chance.” He sighed, blaming himself. “Well, anyhow, we’ll see them there.”
“Sure; it doesn’t matter,” said Basil. But was it Fat’s mistake? Couldn’t Minnie have said right out: “But Basil came all this way to see me and I ought to go with him on his first night here.”
What had happened? One month ago, in the dim, thunderous Union Station at St. Paul, they had gone behind a baggage truck and he had kissed her, and her eyes had said: “Again.” Up to the very end, when she disappeared in a swirl of vapor at the car window, she had been his—those weren’t things you thought; they were things you knew. He was bewildered. It wasn’t like Minnie, who, for all her glittering popularity, was invariably kind. He tried to think of something in his letters that might have offended her, and searched himself for new shortcomings. Perhaps she didn’t like him the way he was in the morning. The joyous mood in which he had arrived was vanishing into air.
She was her familiar self when they played tennis that afternoon; she admired his strokes and once, when they were close at the net, she suddenly patted his hand. But later, as they drank lemonade on the Cheevers’ wide, shady porch, he couldn’t seem to be alone with her even for a minute. Was it by accident that, coming back from the courts, she had sat in front with Fat? Last summer she had made opportunities to be alone with him—made them out of nothing. It was in a state that seemed to border on some terrible realization that he dressed for the country-club dance.
The club lay in a little valley, almost roofed over by willows, and down through their black silhouettes, in irregular blobs and patches, dripped the light of a huge harvest moon. As they parked the car, Basil’s tune of tunes, “Chinatown”, drifted from the windows and dissolved into its notes which thronged like elves through the glade. His heart quickened, suffocating him; the throbbing tropical darkness held a promise of such romance as he had dreamed of; but faced with it, he felt himself too small and impotent to seize the felicity he desired. When he danced with Minnie he was ashamed of inflicting his merely mortal presence on her in this fairyland whose unfamiliar figures reached towering proportions of magnificence and beauty. To make him king here, she would have to reach forth and draw him close to her with soft words; but she only said, “Isn’t it wonderful, Basil? Did you ever have a better time?”
Talking for a moment with Le Moyne in the stag line, Basil was hesitantly jealous and oddly shy. He resented the tall form that stooped down so fiercely over Minnie as they danced, but he found it impossible to dislike him or not to be amused by the line of sober-faced banter he kept up with passing girls. He and William Gasper were the youngest boys here, as Bessie Belle and Minnie were the youngest girls, and for the first time in his life he wanted passionately to be older, less impressionable, less impressed. Quivering at every scent, sight or tune, he wanted to be blasé and calm. Wretchedly he felt the whole world of beauty pour down upon him like moonlight, pressing on him, making his breath now sighing, now short, as he wallowed helplessly in a superabundance of youth for which a hundred adults present would have given years of life.
Next day, meeting her in a world that had shrunk back to reality, things were more natural, but something was gone and he could not bring himself to be amusing and gay. It would be like being brave after the battle. He should have been all that the night before. They went downtown in an unpaired foursome and called at a photographer’s for some pictures of Minnie. Basil liked one proof that no one else liked—somehow, it reminded him of her as she had been in St. Paul—so he ordered two—one for her to keep and one to send after him to Yale. All afternoon she was distracted and vaguely singing, but back at the Cheevers’ she sprang up the steps at the sound of the phone inside. Ten minutes later she appeared, sulky and lowering, and Basil heard a quick exchange between the two girls:
“He can’t get out of it.”
“—a pity.”
“—back Friday.”
It could only be Le Moyne who had gone away, and to Minnie it mattered. Presently, unable to endure her disappointment, he got up wretchedly and suggested to William that they go home. To his surprise, Minnie’s hand on his arm arrested him.
“Don’t go, Basil. It doesn’t seem as if I’ve seen you a minute since you’ve been here.”
He laughed unhappily.
“As if it mattered to you.”
“Basil, don’t be silly.” She bit her lip as if she were hurt. “Let’s go out to the swing.”
He was suddenly radiant with hope and happiness. Her tender smile, which seemed to come from the heart of freshness, soothed him and he drank down her lies in grateful gulps like cool water. The last sunshine touched her cheeks with the unearthly radiance he had seen there before, as she told him how she hadn’t wanted to accept Le Moyne’s invitation, and how surprised and hurt she had been when he hadn’t come near her last night.
“Then do one thing, Minnie,” he pleaded: “Won’t you let me kiss you just once?”
“But not here,” she exclaimed, “you silly!”
“Let’s go in the summerhouse, for just a minute.”
“Basil, I can’t. Bessie Belle and William are on the porch. Maybe some other time.”
He looked at her distraught, unable to believe or disbelieve in her, and she changed the subject quickly:
“I’m going to Miss Beecher’s school, Basil. It’s only a few hours from New Haven. You can come up and see me this fall. The only thing is, they say you have to sit in glass parlors. Isn’t that terrible?”
“Awful,” he agreed fervently.
William and Bessie Belle had left the veranda and were out in front, talking to some people in a car.
“Minnie, come into the summerhouse now—for just a minute. They’re so far away.”
Her face set unwillingly.
“I can’t, Basil. Don’t you see I can’t?”
“Why not? I’ve got to leave tomorrow.”
“Oh, no.”
“I have to. I only have four days to get ready for my exams. Minnie—”
He took her hand. It rested calmly enough in his, but when he tried to pull her to her feet she plucked it sharply away. The swing moved with the little struggle and Basil put out his foot and made it stop. It was terrible to swing when one was at a disadvantage.
She laid the recovered hand on his knee.
“I’ve stopped kissing people, Basil. Really. I’m too old; I’ll be seventeen next May.”
“I’ll bet you kissed Le Moyne,” he said bitterly.
“Well, you’re pretty fresh—”
Basil got out of the swing.
“I think I’ll go.”
Looking up, she judged him dispassionately, as she never had before—his sturdy graceful figure; the high, warm color through his tanned skin; his black, shining hair that she had once thought so romantic. She felt, too—as even those who disliked him felt—that there was something else in his face—a mark, a hint of destiny, a persistence that was more than will, that was rather a necessity of pressing its own pattern on the world, of having its way. That he would most probably succeed at Yale, that it would be nice to go there this year as his girl, meant nothing to her. She had never needed to be calculating. Hesitating, she alternatingly drew him toward her in her mind and let him go. There were so many men and they wanted her so much. If Le Moyne had been here at hand she wouldn’t have hesitated, for nothing must interfere with the mysterious opening glory of that affair; but he was gone for three days and she couldn’t decide quite yet to let Basil go.
“Stay over till Wednesday and I’ll—I’ll do what you want,” she said.
“But I can’t. I’ve got these exams to study for. I ought to have left this afternoon.”
“Study on the train.”
She wriggled, dropped her hands in her lap and smiled at him. Taking her hand suddenly, he pulled her to her feet and toward the summerhouse and the cool darkness behind its vines.
II
The following Friday Basil arrived in New Haven and set about crowding five days’ work into two. He had done no studying on the train; instead he sat in a trance and concentrated upon Minnie, wondering what was happening now that Le Moyne was there. She had kept her promise to him, but only literally—kissed him once in the playhouse, once, grudgingly, the second evening; but the day of his departure there had been a telegram from Le Moyne, and in front of Bessie Belle she had not even dared to kiss him good-by. As a sort of amend she had given him permission to call on the first day permitted by Miss Beecher’s school.
The opening of college found him rooming with Brick Wales and George Dorsey in a suite of two bedrooms and a study in Wright Hall. Until the result of his trigonometry examination was published he was ineligible to play football, but watching the freshmen practice on Yale field, he saw that the quarterback position lay between Cullum, last year’s Andover captain, and a man named Danziger from a New Bedford high school. There was a rumor that Cullum would be moved to halfback. The other quarterbacks did not appear formidable and Basil felt a great impatience to be out there with a team in his hands to move over the springy turf. He was sure he could at least get in some of the games.
Behind everything, as a light showing through, was the image of Minnie; he would see her in a week, three days, tomorrow. On the eve of the occasion he ran into Fat Gaspar, who was in Sheff, in the oval by Haughton Hall. In the first busy weeks they had scarcely met; now they walked along for a little way together.
“We all came North together,” Fat said. “You ought to have been along. We had some excitement. Minnie got in a jam with Littleboy Le Moyne.”
Basil’s blood ran cold.
“It was funny afterward, but she was pretty scared for a while,” continued Fat. “She had a compartment with Bessie Belle, but she and Littleboy wanted to be alone; so in the afternoon Bessie Belle came and played cards in ours. Well, after about two hours Bessie Belle and I went back, and there were Minnie and Littleboy standing in the vestibule arguing with the conductor; Minnie white as a sheet. Seems they locked the door and pulled down the blinds, and I guess there was a little petting going on. When he came along after the tickets and knocked on the door, they thought it was us kidding them, and wouldn’t let him in at first, and when they did, he was pretty upset. He asked Littleboy if that was his compartment, and whether he and Minnie were married that they locked the door, and Littleboy lost his temper trying to explain that there was nothing wrong. He said the conductor had insulted Minnie and he wanted him to fight. But that conductor could have made trouble, and believe me, I had an awful time smoothing it all over.”
With every detail imagined, with every refinement of jealousy beating in his mind, including even envy for their community of misfortune as they stood together in the vestibule, Basil went up to Miss Beecher’s next day. Radiant and glowing, more mysteriously desirable than ever, wearing her very sins like stars, she came down to him in her plain white uniform dress, and his heart turned over at the kindness of her eyes.
“You were wonderful to come up, Basil. I’m so excited having a beau so soon. Everybody’s jealous of me.”
The glass doors hinged like French windows, shutting them in on all sides. It was hot. Down through three more compartments he could see another couple—a girl and her brother, Minnie said—and from time to time they moved and gestured soundlessly, as unreal in these tiny human conservatories as the vase of paper flowers on the table. Basil walked up and down nervously.
“Minnie, I want to be a great man some day and I want to do everything for you. I understand you’re tired of me now. I don’t know how it happened, but somebody else came along—it doesn’t matter. There isn’t any hurry. But I just want you to—oh, remember me in some different way—try to think of me as you used to, not as if I was just another one you threw over. Maybe you’d better not see me for a while—I mean at the dance this fall. Wait till I’ve accomplished some big scene or deed, you know, and I can show it to you and say I did that all for you.”
It was very futile and young and sad. Once, carried away by the tragedy of it all, he was on the verge of tears, but he controlled himself to that extent. There was sweat on his forehead. He sat across the room from her, and Minnie sat on the couch, looking at the floor, and said several times: “Can’t we be friends, Basil? I always think of you as one of my best friends.”
Toward the end she rose patiently.
“Don’t you want to see the chapel?”
They walked upstairs and he glanced dismally into a small dark space, with her living, sweet-smelling presence half a yard from his shoulder. He was almost glad when the funereal business was over and he walked out of the school into the fresh autumn air.
Back in New Haven he found two pieces of mail on his desk. One was a notice from the registrar telling him that he had failed his trigonometry examination and would be ineligible for football. The second was a photograph of Minnie—the picture that he had liked and ordered two of in Mobile. At first the inscription puzzled him: “L. L. from E. G. L. B. Trains are bad for the heart.” Then suddenly he realized what had happened, and threw himself on his bed, shaken with wild laughter.
III
Three weeks later, having requested and passed a special examination in trigonometry, Basil began to look around him gloomily to see if there was anything left in life. Not since his miserable first year at school had he passed through such a period of misery; only now did he begin for the first time to be aware of Yale. The quality of romantic speculation reawoke, and, listlessly at first, then with growing determination, he set about merging himself into this spirit which had fed his dreams so long.
“I want to be chairman of the ‘News’ or the ‘Record’,” thought his old self one October morning, “and I want to get my letter in football, and I want to be in Skull and Bones.”
Whenever the vision of Minnie and Le Moyne on the train occurred to him, he repeated this phrase like an incantation. Already he thought with shame of having stayed over in Mobile, and there began to be long strings of hours when he scarcely brooded about her at all.
He had missed half of the freshman football season, and it was with scant hope that he joined the squad on Yale field. Dressed in his black and white St. Regis jersey, amid the motley of forty schools, he looked enviously at the proud two dozen in Yale blue. At the end of four days he was reconciling himself to obscurity for the rest of the season when the voice of Carson, assistant coach, singled him suddenly out of a crowd of scrub backs.
“Who was throwing those passes just now?”
“I was, sir.”
“I haven’t seen you before, have I?”
“I just got eligible.”
“Know the signals?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Well, you take this team down the field—ends, Krutch and Bispam; tackles—”
A moment later he heard his own voice snapping out on the crisp air: “Thirty-two, sixty-five, sixty-seven, twenty-two—”
There was a ripple of laughter.
“Wait a minute! Where’d you learn to call signals like that?” said Carson.
“Why, we had a Harvard coach, sir.”
“Well, just drop the Haughton emphasis. You’ll get everybody too excited.”
After a few minutes they were called in and told to put on headgears.
“Where’s Waite?” Carson asked. “Test, eh? Well, you then—what’s your name?—in the black and white sweater?”
“Lee.”
“You call signals. And let’s see you get some life into this outfit. Some of you guards and tackles are big enough for the varsity. Keep them on their toes, you—what’s your name?”
“Lee.”
They lined up with possession of the ball on the freshmen’s twenty-yard line. They were allowed unlimited downs, but when, after a dozen plays, they were in approximately that same place, the ball was given to the first team.
“That’s that!” thought Basil. “That finishes me.”
But an hour later, as they got out of the bus, Carson spoke to him:
“Did you weigh this afternoon?”
“Yes. Hundred and fifty-eight.”
“Let me give you a tip—you’re still playing prep-school football. You’re still satisfied with stopping them. The idea here is that if you lay them down hard enough you wear them out. Can you kick?”
“No, sir.”
“Well, it’s too bad you didn’t get out sooner.”
A week later his name was read out as one of those to go to Andover. Two quarterbacks ranked ahead of him, Danziger and a little hard rubber ball of a man, named Appleton, and Basil watched the game from the sidelines, but when, the following Tuesday, Danziger splintered his arm in practice, Basil was ordered to report to training table.
On the eve of the game with the Princeton freshmen, the egress of the student body to Princeton for the Varsity encounter left the campus almost deserted. Deep autumn had set in, with a crackling wind from the west, and walking back to his room after final skull practice, Basil felt the old lust for glory sweep over him. Le Moyne was playing end on the Princeton freshman and it was probable that Minnie would be in the stands, but now, as he ran along the springy grass in front of Osborne, swaying to elude imaginary tacklers, the fact seemed of less importance than the game. Like most Americans, he was seldom able really to grasp the moment, to say: “This, for me, is the great equation by which everything else will be measured; this is the golden time,” but for once the present was sufficient. He was going to spend two hours in a country where life ran at the pace he demanded of it.
The day was fair and cool; an unimpassioned crowd, mostly townsmen, was scattered through the stands. The Princeton freshmen looked sturdy and solid in their diagonal stripes, and Basil picked out Le Moyne, noting coldly that he was exceptionally fast, and bigger than he had seemed in his clothes. On an impulse Basil turned and searched for Minnie in the crowd, but he could not find her. A minute later the whistle blew; sitting at the coach’s side, he concentrated all his faculties on the play.
The first half was played between the thirty-yard lines. The main principles of Yale’s offense seemed to Basil too simple; less effective than the fragments of the Haughton system he had learned at school, while the Princeton tactics, still evolved in Sam White’s long shadow, were built around a punter and the hope of a break. When the break came, it was Yale’s. At the start of the second half Princeton fumbled and Appleton sent over a drop kick from the thirty-yard line.
It was his last act of the day. He was hurt on the next kick-off and, to a burst of freshmen cheering, assisted from the game.
With his heart in a riot, Basil sprinted out on the field. He felt an overpowering strangeness, and it was someone else in his skin who called the first signals and sent an unsuccessful play through the line. As he forced his eyes to take in the field slowly, they met Le Moyne’s, and Le Moyne grinned at him. Basil called for a short pass over the line, throwing it himself for a gain of seven yards. He sent Cullum off tackle for three more and a first down. At the forty, with more latitude, his mind began to function smoothly and surely. His short passes worried the Princeton fullback, and, in consequence, the running gains through the line were averaging four yards instead of two.
At the Princeton forty he dropped back to kick formation and tried Le Moyne’s end, but Le Moyne went under the interfering halfback and caught Basil by a foot. Savagely Basil tugged himself free, but too late—the halfback bowled him over. Again Le Moyne’s face grinned at him, and Basil hated it. He called the same end and, with Cullum carrying the ball, they rolled over Le Moyne six yards, to Princeton’s thirty-two. He was slowing down, was he? Then run him ragged! System counseled a pass, but he heard himself calling the end again. He ran parallel to the line, saw his interference melt away and Le Moyne, his jaw set, coming for him. Instead of cutting in, Basil turned full about and tried to reverse his field. When he was trapped he had lost fifteen yards.
A few minutes later the ball changed hands and he ran back to the safety position thinking: “They’d yank me if they had anybody to put in my place.”
The Princeton team suddenly woke up. A long pass gained thirty yards. A fast new back dazzled his way through the line for another first down. Yale was on the defensive, but even before they had realized the fact, the disaster had happened. Basil was drawn on an apparently developed play; too late he saw the ball shoot out of scrimmage to a loose end; saw, as he was neatly blocked, that the Princeton substitutes were jumping around wildly, waving their blankets. They had scored.
He got up with his heart black, but his brain cool. Blunders could be atoned for—if they only wouldn’t take him out. The whistle blew for the quarter, and squatting on the turf with the exhausted team, he made himself believe that he hadn’t lost their confidence, kept his face intent and rigid, refusing no man’s eye. He had made his errors for today.
On the kick-off he ran the ball back to the thirty-five, and a steady rolling progress began. The short passes, a weak spot inside tackle, Le Moyne’s end. Le Moyne was tired now. His face was drawn and dogged as he smashed blindly into the interference; the ball carrier eluded him—Basil or another.
Thirty more to go—twenty—over Le Moyne again. Disentangling himself from the pile, Basil met the Southerner’s weary glance and insulted him in a crisp voice:
“You’ve quit, Littleboy. They better take you out.”
He started the next play at him and, as Le Moyne charged in furiously, tossed a pass over his head for the score. Yale 10, Princeton 7. Up and down the field again, with Basil fresher every minute and another score in sight, and suddenly the game was over.
Trudging off the field, Basil’s eye ranged over the stands, but he could not see her.
“I wonder if she knows I was pretty bad,” he thought, and then bitterly: “If I don’t, he’ll tell her.”
He could hear him telling her in that soft Southern voice—the voice that had wooed her so persuasively that afternoon on the train. As he emerged from the dressing room an hour later he ran into Le Moyne coming out of the visitors’ quarters next door. He looked at Basil with an expression at once uncertain and angry.
“Hello, Lee.” After a momentary hesitation he added: “Good work.”
“Hello, Le Moyne,” said Basil, clipping his words.
Le Moyne turned away, turned back again.
“What’s the matter?” he demanded. “Do you want to carry this any further?”
Basil didn’t answer. The bruised face and the bandaged hand assuaged his hatred a little, but he couldn’t bring himself to speak. The game was over, and now Le Moyne would meet Minnie somewhere, make the defeat negligible in the victory of the night.
“If it’s about Minnie, you’re wasting your time being sore,” Le Moyne exploded suddenly. “I asked her to the game, but she didn’t come.”
“Didn’t she?” Basil was startled.
“That was it, eh? I wasn’t sure. I thought you were just trying to get my goat in there.” His eyes narrowed. “The young lady kicked me about a month ago.”
“Kicked you?”
“Threw me over. Got a little weary of me. She runs through things quickly.”
Basil perceived that his face was miserable.
“Who is it now?” he asked in more civil tone.
“It seems to be a classmate of yours named Jubal—and a mighty sad bird, if you ask me. She met him in New York the day before her school opened, and I hear it’s pretty heavy. She’ll be at the Lawn Club dance tonight.”
IV
Basil had dinner at the Taft with Jobena Dorsey and her brother George. The Varsity had won at Princeton and the college was jubilant and enthusiastic; as they came in, a table of freshmen by the door gave Basil a hand.
“You’re getting very important,” Jobena said.
A year ago Basil had thought for a few weeks that he was in love with Jobena; when they next met he knew immediately that he was not.
“And why was that?” he asked her now, as they danced. “Why did it all go so quick?”
“Do you really want to know?”
“Yes.”
“Because I let it go.”
“You let it go?” he repeated. “I like that!”
“I decided you were too young.”
“Didn’t I have anything to do with it?”
She shook her head.
“That’s what Bernard Shaw says,” Basil admitted thoughtfully. “But I thought it was just about older people. So you go after the men.”
“Well, I should say not!” Her body stiffened indignantly in his arms. “The men are usually there, and the girl blinks at them or something. It’s just instinct.”
“Can’t a man make a girl fall for him?”
“Some men can—the ones who really don’t care.”
He pondered this awful fact for a moment and stowed it away for future examination. On the way to the Lawn Club he brought forth more questions. If a girl who had been “crazy about a boy” became suddenly infatuated with another, what ought the first boy to do?
“Let her go,” said Jobena.
“Supposing he wasn’t willing to do that. What ought he to do?”
“There isn’t anything to do.”
“Well, what’s the best thing?”
Laughing, Jobena laid her head on his shoulder.
“Poor Basil,” she said, “I’ll be Laura Jean Libbey and you tell me the whole story.”
He summarized the affair. “You see,” he concluded, “if she was just anybody I could get over it, no matter how much I loved her. But she isn’t—she’s the most popular, most beautiful girl I’ve ever seen. I mean she’s like Messalina and Cleopatra and Salome and all that.”
“Louder,” requested George from the front seat.
“She’s sort of an immortal woman,” continued Basil in a lower voice. “You know, like Madame du Barry and all that sort of thing. She’s not just—”
“Not just like me.”
“No. That is, you’re sort of like her—all the girls I’ve cared about are sort of the same. Oh, Jobena, you know what I mean.”
As the lights of the New Haven Lawn Club loomed up she became obligingly serious:
“There’s nothing to do. I can see that. She’s more sophisticated than you. She staged the whole thing from the beginning, even when you thought it was you. I don’t know why she got tired, but evidently she is, and she couldn’t create it again, even if she wanted to, and you couldn’t because you’re—”
“Go on. What?”
“You’re too much in love. All that’s left for you to do is to show her you don’t care. Any girl hates to lose an old beau; so she may even smile at you—but don’t go back. It’s all over.”
In the dressing room Basil stood thoughtfully brushing his hair. It was all over. Jobena’s words had taken away his last faint hope, and after the strain of the afternoon the realization brought tears to his eyes. Hurriedly filling the bowl, he washed his face. Someone came in and slapped him on the back.
“You played a nice game, Lee.”
“Thanks, but I was rotten.”
“You were great. That last quarter—”
He went into the dance. Immediately he saw her, and in the same breath he was dizzy and confused with excitement. A little dribble of stags pursued her wherever she went, and she looked up at each one of them with the bright-eyed, passionate smile he knew so well. Presently he located her escort and indignantly discovered it was a flip, blatant boy from Hill School he had already noticed and set down as impossible. What quality lurked behind those watery eyes that drew her? How could that raw temperament appreciate that she was one of the immortal sirens of the world?
Having examined Mr. Jubal desperately and in vain for the answers to these questions, he cut in and danced all of twenty feet with her, smiling with cynical melancholy when she said:
“I’m so proud to know you, Basil. Everybody says you were wonderful this afternoon.”
But the phrase was precious to him and he stood against the wall repeating it over to himself, separating it into its component parts and trying to suck out any lurking meaning. If enough people praised him it might influence her. “I’m proud to know you, Basil. Everybody says you were wonderful this afternoon.”
There was a commotion near the door and someone said, “By golly, they got in after all!”
“Who?” another asked.
“Some Princeton freshmen. Their football season’s over and three or four of them broke training at the Hofbrau.”
And now suddenly the curious specter of a young man burst out of the commotion, as a back breaks through a line, and neatly straight-arming a member of the dance committee, rushed unsteadily onto the floor. He wore no collar with his dinner coat, his shirt front had long expelled its studs, his hair and eyes were wild. For a moment he glanced around as if blinded by the lights; then his glance fell on Minnie Bibble and an unmistakable love light came into his face. Even before he reached her he began to call her name aloud in a strained, poignant Southern voice.
Basil sprang forward, but others were before him, and Littleboy Le Moyne, fighting hard, disappeared into the coatroom in a flurry of legs and arms, many of which were not his own. Standing in the doorway. Basil found his disgust tempered with a monstrous sympathy; for Le Moyne, each time his head emerged from under the faucet, spoke desperately of his rejected love.
But when Basil danced with Minnie again, he found her frightened and angry; so much so that she seemed to appeal to Basil for support, made him sit down.
“Wasn’t he a fool?” she cried feelingly. “That sort of thing gives a girl a terrible reputation. They ought to have put him in jail.”
“He didn’t know what he was doing. He played a hard game and he’s all in, that’s all.”
But her eyes filled with tears.
“Oh, Basil,” she pleaded, “am I just perfectly terrible? I never want to be mean to anybody; things just happen.”
He wanted to put his arm around her and tell her she was the most romantic person in the world, but he saw in her eyes that she scarcely perceived him; he was a lay figure—she might have been talking to another girl. He remembered what Jobena had said—there was nothing left except to escape with his pride.
“You’ve got more sense.” Her soft voice flowed around him like an enchanted river. “You know that when two people aren’t—aren’t crazy about each other any more, the thing is to be sensible.”
“Of course,” he said, and forced himself to add lightly: “When a thing’s over, it’s over.”
“Oh, Basil, you’re so satisfactory. You always understand.” And now suddenly, for the first time in months, she was actually thinking of him. He would be an invaluable person in any girl’s life, she thought, if that brain of his, which was so annoying sometimes, was really used “to sort of understand.”
He was watching Jobena dance, and Minnie followed his eyes.
“You brought a girl, didn’t you? She’s awfully pretty.”
“Not as pretty as you.”
“Basil.”
Resolutely he refused to look at her, guessing that she had wriggled slightly and folded her hands in her lap. And as he held on to himself an extraordinary thing happened—the world around, outside of her, brightened a little. Presently more freshmen would approach him to congratulate him on the game, and he would like it—the words and the tribute in their eyes. There was a good chance he would start against Harvard next week.
“Basil!”
His heart made a dizzy tour of his chest. Around the corner of his eyes he felt her eyes waiting. Was she really sorry? Should he seize the opportunity to turn to her and say: “Minnie, tell this crazy nut to go jump in the river, and come back to me.” He wavered, but a thought that had helped him this afternoon returned: He had made all his mistakes for this time. Deep inside of him the plea expired slowly.
Jubal the impossible came up with an air of possession, and Basil’s heart went bobbing off around the ballroom in a pink silk dress. Lost again in a fog of indecision, he walked out on the veranda. There was a flurry of premature snow in the air and the stars looked cold. Staring up at them he saw that they were his stars as always—symbols of ambition, struggle and glory. The wind blew through them, trumpeting that high white note for which he always listened, and the thin-blown clouds, stripped for battle, passed in review. The scene was of an unparalleled brightness and magnificence, and only the practiced eye of the commander saw that one star was no longer there.
Published in The Saturday Evening Post (27 April 1929).
Illustrations by Henrietta McCaig Starrett.