Between Three and Four, F. Scott Fitzgerald

I

This happened nowadays, with everyone somewhat discouraged. A lot of less fortunate spirits cracked when money troubles came to be added to all the nervous troubles accumulated in the prosperity— neurosis being a privilege of people with a lot of extra money. And some cracked merely because it was in the air, or because they were used to the great, golden figure of plenty standing behind them, as the idea of prudence and glory stands behind the French, and the idea of “the thing to do” used to stand behind the English. Almost everyone cracked a little.

Howard Butler had never believed in anything, including himself, except the system, and had not believed in that with the intensity of men who were its products or its prophets. He was a quiet, introverted man, not at all brave or resilient and, except in one regard, with no particular harm in him. He thought a lot without much apparatus for thinking, and in normal circumstances one would not expect him to fly very high or sink very low. Nevertheless, he had a vision, which is the matter of this story.

Howard Butler stood in his office on the ninth floor of a building in New York, deciding something. It was a branch and a showroom of B. B. Eddington’s Sons, office furniture and supplies, of which he was a branch manager—a perfect office ceremoniously equipped throughout, though now a little empty because of the decreased personnel due to hard times. Miss Wiess had just telephoned the name of an unwelcome caller, and he was deciding whether he hadn’t just as well see the person now; it was a question of sooner or later. Mrs. Summer was to be shown in.

Mrs. Summer did not need to be shown in, since she had worked there for eight years, up until six months ago. She was a handsome and vital lady in her late forties, with golden-grayish hair, a stylish-stout figure with a reminiscent touch of the Gibson Girl bend to it, and fine young eyes of bright blue. To Howard Butler she was still as vivid a figure as when, as Sarah Belknap, she had declined to marry him nearly thirty years ago—with the essential difference that he hated her.

She came into his private office with an alert way she had and, in a clear, compelling voice that always affected him, said, “Hello, Howard,” as if, without especially liking him, she didn’t object to him at all. This time there was just a touch of strain in her manner.

“Hello, Sarah.”

“Well,” she breathed, “it’s very strange to be back here. Tell me you’ve got a place for me.”

He pursed his lips and shook his head. “Things don’t pick up.”

“H’m.” She nodded and blinked several times.

“Cancellations, bad debts—we’ve closed two branches and there’ve been more pay cuts since you left. I’ve had to take one.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t expect the salary I used to get. I realize how things are. But, literally, I can’t find anything. I thought, perhaps, there might be an opening, say as office manager or head stenographer, with full responsibility. I’d be very glad of fifty dollars a week.”

“We’re not paying anything like that.”

“Or forty-five. Or even forty. I had a chance at twenty-five when I first left here and, like an idiot, I let it go. It seemed absurd after what I’d been getting; I couldn’t keep Jack at Princeton on that. Of course, he’s partly earning his way, but even in the colleges the competition is pretty fierce now—so many boys need money. Anyhow, last week I went back and tried to get the job at twenty-five, and they just laughed at me.” Mrs. Summer smiled grimly, but with full control over herself; yet she could only hold the smile a minute and she talked on to conceal its disappearance: “I’ve been eating at the soup kitchens to save what little I’ve got left. When I think that a woman of my capac­ity——That’s not conceit, Howard; you know I’ve got capacity. Mr.

Eddington always thought so. I never quite understood——”

“It’s tough, Sarah,” he said quickly. He looked at her shoes— they were still good shoes—on top anyhow. She had always been well turned out.

“If I had left earlier, if I’d been let out before the worst times came, I could have placed myself; but when I started hunting, everyone had got panicky.”

“We had to let Muller go too.”

“Oh, you did,” she said, with interest; the news restored her a measure of self-respect.

“A week ago.”

Six months before, the choice had been between Mr. Muller and Mrs. Summer, and Sarah Summer knew, and Howard Butler knew that she knew, that he had made a ticklish decision. He had satisfied an old personal grudge by keeping Muller, who was a young man, clearly less competent and less useful to the firm than Mrs. Summer, and who received the same salary.

Now they stared at each other; she trying to fix on him, to pin him down, to budge him; he trying to avoid her, and succeeding, but only by retreating into recently hollowed out cavities in his soul, but safe cavities, from which he could even regard her plight with a certain satisfaction. Yet he was afraid of what he had done; he was trying to be hard, but in her actual presence the sophistries he had evolved did not help him.

“Howard, you’ve got to give me a job,” she broke out. “Anything—thirty dollars, twenty-five dollars. I’m desperate. I haven’t thirty dollars left. I’ve got to get Jack through this year—his junior year. He wants to be a doctor. He thinks he can hold out till June on his own, but someone drove him down to New York on Washington’s Birthday, and he saw the way I was living. I tried to lie to him, but he guessed, and now he says he’s going to quit and get a job. Howard, I’d rather be dead than stand in his way. I’ve been thinking of nothing else for a week. I’d be better dead. After all, I’ve had my life—and a lot of happiness.”

For an instant Butler wavered. It could be done, but the phrase “a lot of happiness” hardened him, and he told himself how her presence in the office now would be a continual reproach.

Thirty years ago, on the porch of a gabled house in Rochester, he had sat in misery while John Summer and Sarah Belknap had told him moonily about their happiness. “I wanted you to be the first to know, Howard,” Sarah had said. Butler had blundered into it that evening, bringing flowers and a new offer of his heart; then he was suddenly made aware that things were changed, that he wasn’t very alive for either of them. Later, something she had said was quoted or misquoted to him—that if John Summer had not come along, she’d have been condemned to marry Howard Butler.

Years later he had walked into the office one morning to find her his subordinate. This time there was something menacing and repellent in his wooing, and she had put a stop to it immediately, definitely and finally. Then, for eight years, Butler had suffered her presence in the office, drying out in the sunshine of her vitality, growing bitter in the shadow of her indifference; aware that, despite her widowhood, her life was more complete than his.

“I can’t do it,” he said, as if regretfully. “Things are stripped to the bone here. There’s no one you could displace. Miss Wiess has been here twelve years.”

“I wonder if it would do any good to talk to Mr. Eddington.”

“He’s not in New York, and it wouldn’t do any good.”

She was beaten, but she went on evenly, “Is there any likelihood of a change, in the next month, say?”

Butler shrugged his shoulders. “How does anybody know when business will pick up? I’ll keep you in mind if anything turns up.” Then he added, in a surge of weakness: “Come back in a week or so, some afternoon between three and four.”

Mrs. Summer got up; she looked older than when she had come into the office.

“I’ll come back then.” She stood twisting her gloves, and her eyes seemed to stare out into more space than the office inclosed. “If you haven’t anything for me then, I’ll probably just—quit permanently.”

She walked quickly to the window, and he half rose from his chair.

“Nine floors is a nice height,” she remarked. “You could think things out one more time on the way down.”

“Oh, don’t talk that way. You’ll get a break any day now.”

“Business Woman Leaps Nine Floors to Death,” said Mrs. Summer, her eyes still fixed out the window. She sighed in a long, frightened breath, and turned toward the door. “Good-by, Howard. If you think things over, you’ll see I was right in not even trying to love you. I’ll be back some day next week, between three and four.”

He thought of offering her five dollars, but that would break down something inside him, so he let her go like that.

II

He saw her through the transparent place where the frosting was rubbed from the glass of his door. She was thinner than she had been last week, and obviously nervous, starting at anyone coming in or going out. Her foot was turned sideways under the chair and he saw where an oval hole was stopped with a piece of white cardboard.

When her name was telephoned, he said, “Wait,” letting himself be annoyed that she had come slightly before three; but the real cause of his anger lay in