The Pearl and the Fur, F. Scott Fitzgerald

I

Gwen had been shopping all Saturday afternoon and at six she came home heavy laden. Among other things she had purchased two dozen little tin cylinders to attach to her hair at bedtime and let dangle through the night; a set of grotesque artificial finger nails which violated all disarmament treaties; a set of six inch pennons of Navy, Princeton, Vassar, and Yale; and a packet of travel booklets describing voyages to Bermuda, Jamaica, Havana and South America.

Wearily—as weariness goes at fourteen—she cast it all on the couch and phoned her friend Dizzy Campbell.

“Well, guess what?” she said.

“What?” Dizzy’s voice was full of excitement. “Was it real?”

“It was not,” said Gwen disgustedly, “I took it to the jewel man at Kirk’s and he said it was just a piece of shell that they often have in oysters.”

Dizzy sighed.

“Well, then we don’t go for a trip this Easter.”

“I’m so mad I can scarcely see. Daddy was sure it was a pearl when he almost broke a tooth on it in the restaurant.”

“After all we’d planned,” Dizzy lamented.

“I was so sure that I went to the travel bureau first and got a lot of books with the best pictures of people sitting around swimming pools on the deck and dancing with the cutest boys only seventy dollars minimum—if Daddy would listen to reason.”

They sighed audibly in full mutual comprehension.

“There is one thing, though,” said Dizzy. “—though it isn’t like the other. Mrs. Tulliver wants to take four or five girls from school to New York for a few days. Mother says I can go but I said I’d tell her later because I was waiting to hear about the pearl—Father said it probably wouldn’t be any good if it was cooked anyhow. This would be better than nothing.”

“I guess so,” said Gwen doubtfully. “But you don’t suppose she’d take us to the Rainbow Room and places like that, would she? Would it just be kind of museums and concerts?”

“She’d take us to the theatre and shopping.”

Gwen’s bright blue eyes began to come back to life.

“Well, I’ll ask Daddy,” she said, “He ought to do that anyhow after being wrong about the pearl.”

II

Five young ladies of fourteen and fifteen rode to New York the following Monday. Mrs. Tulliver’s original plan was to stop at an inn for women only, but upon their vehement protest that they wanted music with meals they put up at a “quiet” hotel in the fifties. They saw two plays and went to Rockefeller Center, bought summer clothes according to their allowances and had a touch of night life in the afternoon by going to a hotel famous for its tea dances and listening to a favorite orchestra play, though they had no partners of their own.

All of them had tried to provide against this contingency by pledging boys to “come up if you possibly can” and even writing frantic letters to long neglected swains met last summer that they would be in the great city on a certain date. Alas, though they leapt at the sound of the telephone it was invariably one of their rooms calling the other.

“Heard anything?”

“No. Had one letter—so sorry and all that sort of thing.”

“I had a wire from a boy in New Mexico.”

“Mine was from California. Isn’t there ever anybody in New York?”

It was all pretty tame, Gwen thought, though they enjoyed themselves.

The trouble was not so much the lack of boys as the impossibility of doing anything very gay and glamorous without boys. On the next to the last day Mrs. Tulliver called them together in her room.

“Now I’m not blind or deaf and I know you haven’t had all the excitement you expected, though I didn’t promise we’d paint the town red. Still I don’t want you to feel you’ve been chaperoned to death so I have a little plan.”

She paused and five glances were bent on her expectantly.

“My plan will give you a few hours of complete independence and it ought to be useful when school opens again.”

The gleam went out of the ten young eyes, though they still gave formal attention.

“Now tomorrow morning I want each of you to go out by herself and make an investigation of some part of New York—find out all about it so you could write a composition if you had to—though I’m not going to ask you that in vacation. I’d say go in pairs but I know you’d find out much more if you went by yourselves. You’re old enough for such an adventure. Now don’t you think it sounds sort of fun?”

“I’ll take Chinatown,” Gwen volunteered.

“Oh, no, no!” said Mrs. Tulliver hurriedly, “I wasn’t thinking of anything like that. I meant something more like the Aquarium for instance though I want each of you to invent some individual experience.”

Gathered by themselves the clan debated the matter cynically. Dizzy complained: “If she’d let us go out at night, each to a different night club and bring back our reports in the morning then there’d be some sense to it. I don’t know what to do—we’ve been up in the Empire State and we’ve seen the flower show and the Planetarium and the flea-circus. I think I’ll just go over to the Ritz Hotel and inspect that. You always hear about things being ‘Ritzy’ and I’d like to see about it.”

Gwen had a plan formulating in her head but she did not mention it. The idea of a trip was persistently in her mind, a trip with a set destination perhaps, but nevertheless a voyage, sharply different from the stationary life of school.

I’ll get on a 5th Avenue bus, she thought, and go as far as that goes. And then I’ll get on a street car or elevated and go as far as that goes.

At nine next morning the troup embarked on their separate destinies. It was a fine day with the buildings sparkling upward like pale dry ginger-ale through the blue air. An officious woman sitting next to her on top of the bus tried to begin a conversation but Gwen quelled her with a steely regard and turned her eyes outward. The bus followed Riverside Drive along the Hudson and then came to a region of monotonous apartment rows, which embody the true depths of the city, darkly mysterious at night, drab in the afternoon and full of bright hope in the morning. Presently they had reached the end of the line. Gwen asked a question of the conductor and he indicated the mouth of a subway half a block down the street.

“But isn’t there an elevated?” she demanded.

“The subway gets to be an elevated part of the time.”

The northbound train for Kingsbridge was almost deserted. Kingsbridge—Gwen could see it already: great mansions with Norman keeps and Gothic towers. Southampton was probably somewhere around here and Newport, all such fashionable places, which she vaguely supposed resembled the outlying sections of her own city.

At Two hundred and thirtieth Street she followed the last two passengers out into Kingsbridge—and found herself on a bleak plain, scarred with a few isolated “developments,” a drug store, a gas station and a quick lunch. Going up a little hill she looked back with some pride over the distance she had come. She was actually at the dead end of New York—even in the crystalline air the skyscrapers of Manhattan Island were minute and far away. She wondered if Dizzy was really rowing a boat on Central Park Lake or if Clara had gone to enroll herself in a theatrical casting agency—this last having been Gwen’s suggestion. They were somewhere within that great battlement of a city and she was without, as detached as in an aeroplane.

Gwen looked at her watch and discovered she had been traveling a long time—she could just get back in time for one o’clock lunch. Returning to the subway she saw the train by which she had come gathering momentum as it left the station. A negro cleaning the platform told her there would be another one in an hour.

—Here’s where I miss the matinee, she mourned. And it was the last one.

“Do they have taxies out here?” she asked.

“They’s a stand by the drug store, but ain’t usually no cabs around.”

She was in luck, though. A single taxi stood there and beside it was the driver, a very young man wearing an expression of some anxiety. When Gwen asked him if he was free this seemed to clear away, as if her words were an open-sesame to something and he said with obvious eagerness:

“I certainly am free. Walk right in—I mean step right in.”

Shutting the door after her he got in front.

“Where do you want to go?”

She named her hotel. He produced a little red book, brand new, and thumbed through it.

“Madison and Fifty-fifth Street,” he announced.

“I could have told you that,” said Gwen.

“Yes—I suppose you could. I’m not very familiar with the city yet. Excuse me for being so dumb.”

He sounded rather nice.

“Don’t you live in New York?” she asked.

“I do now, but I’m from Vermont. What’s that street again—Madison and—?”

“Madison and Fifty-fifth.”

He started the motor and as quickly shut it off—turned around apologetically.

“I’m sorry, there’ll be a short delay. This is what they call a dead-head—”

“Something wrong with the car?”

“No—nothing wrong with the car. In the taxi business they call this a dead-head and when you’re at one you’ve got to call up the office and say you’re leaving.”

With that he was out of the car and into the quick lunch shop, whence presently she heard his voice saying something inexplicable