F. Scott Fitzgerald: Complete Works

II

II.

Regularly every two weeks he had been drifting out Fifth Avenue. On crisp autumn afternoons the tops of the shining auto buses were particularly alluring. From the roofs of other passing buses a face barely seen, an interested glance, a flash of color assumed the proportion of an intrigue. He had left college five years before and the buses and the art gallery and a few books were his intellectual relaxation. Freshman year Carlyle’s “Heroes and Hero-Worship,” in the hands of an impassioned young instructor, had interested him particularly. He had read practically nothing. He had neither the leisure to browse thoughtfully on much nor the education to cram thoughtfully on little, so his philosophy of life was molded of two elements: one the skeptical office philosophy of his associate, with a girl, a ten-thousand-dollar position, and a Utopian flat in some transfigured Bronx at the end of it; and the other, the three or four big ideas which he found in the plain-speaking Scotsman, Carlyle. But he felt, and truly, that his whole range was pitifully small. He was not naturally bookish; his taste could be stimulated as in the case of “Heroes and Hero-Worship” but he was still and now always would be in the stage where every work and every author had to be introduced and sometimes interpreted to him. “Sartor Resartus” meant nothing to him nor ever could.

So Fifth Avenue and the top of the buses had really grown to stand for a lot. They meant relief from the painted, pagan crowds of Broadway, the crowded atmosphere of the blue serge suits and grated windows that he met downtown and the dingy middle-class cloud that hovered on his boarding house. Fifth Avenue had a certain respectability which he would have once despised; the people on the buses looked better fed, their mouths came together in better lines. Always a symbolist, and an idealist, whether his model had been a profligate but magnetic sophomore or a Carlylized Napoleon, he sought around him in his common life for something to cling to, to stand for what religions and families and philosophies of life had stood for. He had a certain sense of fitness which convinced him that his old epicureanism, romantic as it might have been in the youth of his year at college, would have been exotic and rather disgusting in the city itself. It was much too easy; it lacked the penance of the five o’clock morning train back to college that had faced himself and his fellow student revelers; it lacked the penance of the long morning in classes and the poverty of weeks. It had been something to have, a reputation, even such a reputation as this crowd had had, but dissipation from the New York standpoint seemed a matter of spats and disgustingly rich Hebrews, and shoddy Bohemianism had no attraction for him.

Yet he was happy this afternoon. Perhaps because the bus on which he rode was resplendent in its shining new coat of green paint, and the stick-of-candy glamor of it had gone into his disposition. He lit a cigarette and made himself rather comfortable until he arrived at his destination. There were only certain sections of the museum that he visited. Statuary never attracted him, and the Italian madonnas and Dutch gentlemen with inconsequent gloves and books in the foreground rather bored him. It was only here and there in an old picture tucked away in the corner that his eye caught the glare of light on snow in a simple landscape or the bright colors and multiple figures of a battle painting, and he was drawn into long and detailed fits of contemplation and frequent revisits.

On this particular afternoon he was wandering rather aimlessly from one room to another when he suddenly noticed a small man in overshoes, his face latticed with enormous spectacles, thumbing a catalogue in front of a Flemish group. He started, and with a sense of recollection walked by him several times. Suddenly he realized that here was that one-time instrument of his fate, the gargoyle, the little preceptor who had flunked him in his crucial examination.

Oddly enough his first sensation was one of pleased reminiscence and a desire for conversation. Following that he had a curious feeling of shyness, untinged by any bitterness. He paused, staring heavily, and instantly the huge glasses glimmered suspiciously in his eyes.

“Pardon me, sir, but do you remember me?” he asked eagerly.

The preceptor blinked feverishly.

“Ah—no.”

He mentioned the college and the blinks became more optimistic. He wisely decided to let the connection rest there. The preceptor couldn’t, couldn’t possibly remember all the men who had passed before his two “Mirrors of Shalott” so why bring up old, accusing facts—besides—he felt a great desire to chat.

“Yes—no doubt—your face is familiar, you’ll pardon my—my chilliness a moment since—a public place.” He looked around depreciatingly. “You see, I’ve left the university myself.”

“So you’ve gone up in the game?” He instantly regretted this remark for the little man answered rather quickly:

“I’m teaching in a high school in Brooklyn.” Rather embarrassed, the younger man tried to change the subject by looking at the painting before them, but the gargoyle grimly continued:

“I have—a—rather a large family, and much as I regretted leaving the university, the salary was unfortunately very much of a factor.”

There was a pause during which both regarded the picture steadily. Then the gargoyle asked a question:

“How long since you’ve graduated?”

“Oh, I never graduated. I was there for only a short while.” He was sure now that the gargoyle had not the slightest conception of his identity; he might rather enjoy this, however, and he had a pleasant notion that the other was not averse to his company.

“Are you staying here much longer?” The gargoyle was not, and together they moved to a restaurant two blocks down where they indulged in milk, tea and jam and discussed the university. When six o’clock pushed itself into the crowded hours it was with real regret that they shook hands, and the little man, manipulating his short legs in mad expostulation, raced after a Brooklyn car. Yes, it had been distinctly exhilarating. They had talked of academic atmospheres, of hopes that lay in the ivied walls, of little things that could only have counted after the mystic hand of the separation had made them akin. The gargoyle had touched lightly upon his own story, of the work he was doing, of his own tepid, stuffy environment. It was his hope some day to get back, but now there were young appetites to satisfy (the other thought grotesquely of the young gargoyles)—if he could see his way clear in the next few years,—so it went, but through all his hopeful talk there was a kind of inevitability that he would teach in a Brooklyn high school till the last bell called him to his last class. Yes, he went back occasionally. He had a younger brother who was an instructor there.

So they had talked, knit together by the toast and the sense of exile. That night the shrivelled spinster on his left at table asked him what college he thought would be worthy of ushering her promising nephew into the outer world. He became voluble and discoursive. He spoke of ties that bind, of old associations, and remarked carelessly, as he left her, that he was running back himself for a day the next week. But afterwards he lay awake and thought until the chairs and bedposts of his room became grey ghosts in the dawn.