“Say I love you,” he whispered.
“I’m in love with you.”
“Oh, no; that’s not the same.”
She hesitated. “I’ve never said the other to anybody.”
“Please say it.”
She blushed the color of the sunset.
“At my party,” she whispered. “It’d be easier at night.”
When she dropped him in front of his house she spoke from the window of the car:
“This is my excuse for coming to see you. My uncle couldn’t get the club Thursday, so we’re having the party at the regular dance Saturday night.”
Basil walked thoughtfully into the house; Rhoda Sinclair was also giving a dinner at the College Club dance Saturday night.
VI
It was put up to him frankly. Mrs. Reilly listened to his tentative excuses in silence and then said:
“Rhoda invited you first for Saturday night, and she already has one girl too many. Of course, if you choose to simply turn your back on your engagement and go to another party, I don’t know how Rhoda will feel, but I know how I should feel.”
And the next day his great-uncle, passing through the stock room, stopped and said: “What’s all this trouble about parties?”
Basil started to explain, but Mr. Reilly cut him short. “I don’t see the use of hurting a young girl’s feelings. You better think it over.”
Basil had thought it over; on Saturday afternoon he was still expected at both dinners and he had hit upon no solution at all.
Yale was only a month away now, but in four days Erminie Bibble would be gone, uncommitted, unsecured, grievously offended, lost forever. Not yet delivered from adolescence, Basil’s moments of foresight alternated with those when the future was measured by a day. The glory that was Yale faded beside the promise of that incomparable hour.
On the other side loomed up the gaunt specter of the university, with phantoms flitting in and out its portals that presently disclosed themselves as peasants and girls. At five o’clock, in a burst of contempt for his weakness, he went to the phone and left word with a maid at the Kampfs’ house that he was sick and couldn’t come tonight. Nor would he sit with the dull left-overs of his generation—too sick for one party, he was too sick for the other. The Reillys could have no complaint as to that.
Rhoda answered the phone and Basil tried to reduce his voice to a weak murmur:
“Rhoda, I’ve been taken sick. I’m in bed now,” he murmured feebly, and then added: “The phone’s right next to the bed, you see; so I thought I’d call you up myself.”
“You mean to say you can’t come?” Dismay and anger were in her voice.
“I’m sick in bed,” he repeated doggedly. “I’ve got chills and a pain and a cold.”
“Well, can’t you come anyhow?” she asked, with what to the invalid seemed a remarkable lack of consideration. “You’ve just got to. Otherwise there’ll be two extra girls.”
“I’ll send someone to take my place,” he said desperately. His glance, roving wildly out the window, fell on a house over the way. “I’ll send Eddie Parmelee.”
Rhoda considered. Then she asked with quick suspicion: “You’re not going to that other party?”
“Oh, no; I told them I was sick too.”
Again Rhoda considered. Eddie Parmelee was mad at her.
“I’ll fix it up,” Basil promised. “I know he’ll come. He hasn’t got anything to do tonight.”
A few minutes later he dashed across the street. Eddie himself, tying a bow on his collar, came to the door. With certain reservations, Basil hastily outlined the situation. Would Eddie go in his place?
“Can’t do it, old boy, even if I wanted to. Got a date with my real girl tonight.”
“Eddie, I’d make it worth your while,” he said recklessly. “I’d pay you for your time—say, five dollars.”
Eddie considered, there was hesitation in his eyes, but he shook his head.
“It isn’t worth it, Basil. You ought to see what I’m going out with tonight.”
“You could see her afterward. They only want you—I mean me—because they’ve got more girls than men for dinner—and listen, Eddie, I’ll make it ten dollars.”
Eddie clapped him on the shoulder.
“All right, old boy, I’ll do it for an old friend. Where’s the pay?”
More than a week’s salary melted into Eddie’s palm, but another sort of emptiness accompanied Basil back across the street—the emptiness of the coming night. In an hour or so the Kampfs’ limousine would draw up at the College Club and—time and time again his imagination halted miserably before that single picture, unable to endure any more.
In despair he wandered about the dark house. His mother had let the maid go out and was at his grandfather’s for dinner, and momentarily Basil considered finding some rake like Elwood Leaming and going down to Carling’s Restaurant to drink whiskey, wines and beer. Perhaps on her way back to the lake after the dance, Minnie, passing by, would see his face among the wildest of the revelers and understand.
“I’m going to Maxim’s,” he hummed to himself desperately; then he added impatiently: “Oh, to heck with Maxim’s!”
He sat in the parlor and watched a pale moon come up over the Lindsays’ fence at McKubben Street. Some young people came by, heading for the trolley that went to Como Park. He pitied their horrible dreariness—they were not going to dance with Minnie at the College Club tonight.
Eight-thirty—she was there now. Nine—they were dancing between courses to Peg of My Heart or doing the Castle Walk that Andy Lockheart brought home from Yale.
At ten o’clock he heard his mother come in, and almost immediately the phone rang. For a moment he listened without interest to her voice; then abruptly he sat up in his chair.
“Why, yes; how do you do, Mrs. Reilly… Oh, I see… Oh… Are you sure it isn’t Basil you want to speak to? … Well, frankly, Mrs. Reilly, I don’t see that it’s my affair.”
Basil got up and took a step toward the door; his mother’s voice was growing thin and annoyed: “I wasn’t here at the time and I don’t know who he promised to send.”
Eddie Parmelee hadn’t gone after all—well, that was the end.
“…Of course not. It must be a mistake. I don’t think Basil would possibly do that; I don’t think he even knows any Japanese.”
Basil’s brain reeled. For a moment he was about to dash across the street after Eddie Parmelee. Then he heard a definitely angry note come into his mother’s voice:
“Very well, Mrs. Reilly. I’ll tell my son. But his going to Yale is scarcely a matter I care to discuss with you. In any case, he no longer needs anyone’s assistance.”
He had lost his position and his mother was trying to put a proud face on it. But her voice continued, soaring a little:
“Uncle Ben might be interested to know that this afternoon we sold the Third Street block to the Union Depot Company for four hundred thousand dollars.”
VII
Mr. Utsonomia was enjoying himself. In the whole six months in America he had never felt so caught up in its inner life before. At first it had been a little hard to make plain to the lady just whose place it was he was taking, but Eddie Parmelee had assured him that such substitutions were an American custom, and he was spending the evening collecting as much data upon American customs as possible.
He did not dance, so he sat with the elderly lady until both the ladies went home, early and apparently a little agitated, shortly after dinner. But Mr. Utsonomia stayed on. He watched and he wandered. He was not lonesome; he had grown accustomed to being alone.
About eleven he sat on the veranda pretending to be blowing the smoke of a cigarette—which he hated—out over the city, but really listening to a conversation which was taking place just behind. It had been going on for half an hour, and it puzzled him, for apparently it was a proposal, and it was not refused. Yet, if his eyes did not deceive him, the contracting parties were of an age that Americans did not associate with such serious affairs. Another thing puzzled him even more: obviously, if one substituted for an absent guest, the absent guest should not be among those present, and he was almost sure that the young man who had just engaged himself for marriage was Mr. Basil Lee. It would be bad manners to intrude now, but he would urbanely ask him about a solution of this puzzle when the State University opened in the fall.
Published in The Saturday Evening Post (30 March 1929).
