The Smilers, F. Scott Fitzgerald

We all have that exasperated moment!

There are times when you almost tell the harmless old lady next door what you really think of her face—that it ought to be on a night-nurse in a house for the blind; when you’d like to ask the man you’ve been waiting ten minutes for if he isn’t all overheated from racing the postman down the block; when you nearly say to the waiter that if they deducted a cent from the bill for every degree the soup was below tepid the hotel would owe you half a dollar; when—and this is the infallible earmark of true exasperation—a smile affects you as an oil-baron’s undershirt affects a cow’s husband.

But the moment passes. Scars may remain on your dog or your collar or your telephone receiver, but your soul has slid gently back into its place between the lower edge of your heart and the upper edge of your stomach, and all is at peace.

But the imp who turns on the shower-bath of exasperation apparently made it so hot one time in Sylvester Stockton’s early youth that he never dared dash in and turn it off—in consequence no first old man in an amateur production of a Victorian comedy was ever more pricked and prodded by the daily phenomena of life than was Sylvester at thirty.

Accusing eyes behind spectacles—suggestion of a stiff neck—this will have to do for his description, since he is not the hero of this story. He is the plot. He is the factor that makes it one story instead of three stories. He makes remarks at the beginning and end.

The late afternoon sun was loitering pleasantly along Fifth Avenue when Sylvester, who had just come out of that hideous public library where he had been consulting some ghastly book, told his impossible chauffeur (it is true that I am following his movements through his own spectacles) that he wouldn’t need his stupid, incompetent services any longer. Swinging his cane (which he found too short) in his left hand (which he should have cut off long ago since it was constantly offending him), he began walking slowly down the Avenue.

When Sylvester walked at night he frequently glanced behind and on both sides to see if anyone was sneaking up on him. This had become a constant mannerism. For this reason he was unable to pretend that he didn’t see Betty Tearle sitting in her machine in front of Tiffany’s.

Back in his early twenties he had been in love with Betty Tearle. But he had depressed her. He had misanthropically dissected every meal, motor trip and musical comedy that they attended together, and on the few occasions when she had tried to be especially nice to him—from a mother’s point of view he had been rather desirable—he had suspected hidden motives and fallen into a deeper gloom than ever. Then one day she told him that she would go mad if he ever again parked his pessimism in her sun-parlour.

And ever since then she had seemed to be smiling—uselessly, insultingly, charmingly smiling.

“Hello, Sylvo,” she called.

“Why—how do, Betty.” He wished she wouldn’t call him Sylvo—it sounded like a—like a darn monkey or something.

“How goes it?” she asked cheerfully. “Not very well, I suppose.”

“Oh, yes,” he answered stiffly, “I manage.”

“Taking in the happy crowd?”

“Heavens, yes.” He looked around him. “Betty, why are they happy? What are they smiling at? What do they find to smile at?”

Betty flashed him a glance of radiant amusement.

“The women may smile because they have pretty teeth, Sylvo.”

“You smile,” continued Sylvester cynically, “because you’re comfortably married and have two children. You imagine you’re happy, so you suppose everyone else is.”

Betty nodded.

“You may have hit it, Sylvo——” The chauffeur glanced around and she nodded at him. “Good-bye.”

Sylvo watched with a pang of envy which turned suddenly to exasperation as he saw she had turned and smiled at him once more. Then her car was out of sight in the traffic, and with a voluminous sigh he galvanized his cane into life and continued his stroll.

At the next corner he stopped in at a cigar store and there he ran into Waldron Crosby. Back in the days when Sylvester had been a prize pigeon in the eyes of debutantes he had also been a game partridge from the point of view of promoters. Crosby, then a young bond salesman, had given him much safe and sane advice and saved him many dollars. Sylvester liked Crosby as much as he could like anyone. Most people did like Crosby.

“Hello, you old bag of nerves,” cried Crosby genially, “come and have a big gloom-dispelling Corona.”

Sylvester regarded the cases anxiously. He knew he wasn’t going to like what he bought.

“Still out at Larchmont, Waldron?” he asked.

“Right-o.”

“How’s your wife?”

“Never better.”

“Well,” said Sylvester suspiciously, “you brokers always look as if you’re smiling at something up your sleeve. It must be a hilarious profession.”

Crosby considered.

“Well,” he admitted, “it varies—like the moon and the price of soft drinks—but it has its moments.”

“Waldron,” said Sylvester earnestly, “you’re a friend of mine—please do me the favour of not smiling when I leave you. It seems like a—like a mockery.”

A broad grin suffused Crosby’s countenance.

“Why, you crabbed old son-of-a-gun!”

But Sylvester with an irate grunt had turned on his heel and disappeared.

He strolled on. The sun finished its promenade and began calling in the few stray beams it had left among the westward streets. The Avenue darkened with black bees from the department stores; the traffic swelled in to an interlaced jam; the buses were packed four deep like platforms above the thick crowd; but Sylvester, to whom the daily shift and change of the city was a matter only of sordid monotony, walked on, taking only quick sideward glances through his frowning spectacles.

He reached his hotel and was elevated to his four-room suite on the twelfth floor.

“If I dine downstairs,” he thought, “the orchestra will play either ‘Smile, Smile, Smile’ or ‘The Smiles That You Gave To Me’. But then if I go to the Club I’ll meet all the cheerful people I know, and if I go somewhere else where there’s no music, I won’t get anything fit to eat.”

He decided to have dinner in his rooms.

An hour later, after disparaging some broth, a squab and a salad, he tossed fifty cents to the room-waiter, and then held up his hand warningly.

“Just oblige me by not smiling when you say ‘thanks’?”

He was too late. The waiter had grinned.

“Now, will you please tell me,” asked Sylvester peevishly, “what on earth you have to smile about?”

The waiter considered. Not being a reader of the magazines he was not sure what was characteristic of waiters, yet he supposed something characteristic was expected of him.

“Well, mister,” he answered, glancing at the ceiling with all the ingenuousness he could muster in his narrow, sallow countenance, “it’s just something my face does when it sees four bits comin’.”

Sylvester waved him away.

“Waiters are happy because they’ve never had anything better,” he thought. “They haven’t enough imagination to want anything.”

At nine o’clock from sheer boredom he sought his expressionless bed.

II

As Sylvester left the cigar store, Waldron Crosby followed him out, and turning off Fifth Avenue down a cross street entered a brokerage office. A plump man with nervous hands rose and hailed him.

“Hello, Waldron.”

“Hello, Potter—I just dropped in to hear the worst.”

The plump man frowned.

“We’ve just got the news,” he said.

“Well, what is it? Another drop?”

“Closed at seventy-eight. Sorry, old boy.”

“Whew!”

“Hit pretty hard?”

“Cleaned out!”

The plump man shook his head, indicating that life was too much for him, and turned away.

Crosby sat there for a moment without moving. Then he rose, walked into Potter’s private office and picked up the phone.

“Gi’me Larchmont 838.”

In a moment he had his connection.

“Mrs. Crosby there?”

A man’s voice answered him.

“Yes; this you, Crosby? This is Doctor Shipman.”

“Dr. Shipman?” Crosby’s voice showed sudden anxiety.

“Yes—I’ve been trying to reach you all afternoon. The situation’s changed and we expect the child tonight.”

“Tonight?”

“Yes. Everything’s OK. But you’d better come right out.”

“I will. Good-bye.”

He hung up the receiver and started out the door, but paused as an idea struck him. He returned, and this time called a Manhattan number.

“Hello, Donny, this is Crosby.”

“Hello, there, old boy. You just caught me; I was going——”

“Say, Donny, I want a job right away, quick.”

“For whom?”

“For me.”

“Why, what’s the——”

“Never mind. Tell you later. Got one for me?”

“Why, Waldron, there’s not a blessed thing here except a clerkship. Perhaps next——”

“What salary goes with the clerkship?”

“Forty—say forty-five a week.”

“I’ve got you. I start tomorrow.”

“All right. But say, old man——”

“Sorry, Donny, but I’ve got to run.”

Crosby hurried from the brokerage office with a wave and a smile at Potter. In the street he took out a handful of small change and after surveying it critically hailed a taxi.

“Grand Central—quick!” he told the driver.

III

At six o’clock Betty Tearle signed the letter, put it into an envelope and wrote her husband’s name upon it. She went into his room and after a moment’s hesitation set a black cushion on the bed and laid the white letter on it so that it could not fail to attract his attention when he came in. Then with a quick glance around the room she walked into the hall and upstairs to the nursery.

“Clare,” she called softly.

“Oh, Mummy!” Clare left her doll’s house and scurried to her mother.

“Where’s Billy, Clare?”

Billy appeared eagerly from under the bed.

“Got anything for me?” he inquired politely.

His mother’s laugh ended in a little catch and she caught both her children to her and kissed them passionately. She found that she was crying quietly and their flushed