What a Handsome Pair! F. Scott Fitzgerald

I

At four o’clock on a November afternoon in 1902, Teddy Van Beck got out of a hansom cab in front of a brownstone house on Murray Hill. He was a tall, round-shouldered young man with a beaked nose and soft brown eyes in a sensitive face. In his veins quarreled the blood of colonial governors and celebrated robber barons; in him the synthesis had produced, for that time and place, something different and something new.

His cousin, Helen Van Beck, waited in the drawing-room. Her eyes were red from weeping, but she was young enough for it not to detract from her glossy beauty—a beauty that had reached the point where it seemed to contain in itself the secret of its own growth, as if it would go on increasing forever. She was nineteen and, contrary to the evidence, she was extremely happy.

Teddy put his arm around her and kissed her cheek, and found it changing into her ear as she turned her face away. He held her for a moment, his own enthusiasm chilling; then he said:

“You don’t seem very glad to see me.”

Helen had a premonition that this was going to be one of the memorable scenes of her life, and with unconscious cruelty she set about extracting from it its full dramatic value. She sat in a corner of the couch, facing an easy-chair.

“Sit there,” she commanded, in what was then admired as a “regal manner,” and then, as Teddy straddled the piano stool: “No, don’t sit there. I can’t talk to you if you’re going to revolve around.”

“Sit on my lap,” he suggested.

“No.”

Playing a one-handed flourish on the piano, he said, “I can listen better here.”

Helen gave up hopes of beginning on the sad and quiet note.

“This is a serious matter, Teddy. Don’t think I’ve decided it without a lot of consideration. I’ve got to ask you—to ask you to release me from our understanding.”

“What?” Teddy’s face paled with shock and dismay.

“I’ll have to tell you from the beginning. I’ve realized for a long time that we have nothing in common. You’re interested in your music, and I can’t even play chopsticks.” Her voice was weary as if with suffering; her small teeth tugged at her lower lip.

“What of it?” he demanded, relieved. “I’m musician enough for both. You wouldn’t have to understand banking to marry a banker, would you?”

“This is different,” Helen answered. “What would we do together? One important thing is that you don’t like riding; you told me you were afraid of horses.”

“Of course I’m afraid of horses,” he said, and added reminiscently: “They try to bite me.”

“It makes it so—”

“I’ve never met a horse—socially, that is—who didn’t try to bite me. They used to do it when I put the bridle on; then, when I gave up putting the bridle on, they began reaching their heads around trying to get at my calves.”

The eyes of her father, who had given her a Shetland at three, glistened, cold and hard, from her own.

“You don’t even like the people I like, let alone the horses,” she said.

“I can stand them. I’ve stood them all my life.”

“Well, it would be a silly way to start a marriage. I don’t see any grounds for mutual—mutual—”

“Riding?”

“Oh, not that.” Helen hesitated, and then said in an unconvinced tone, “Probably I’m not clever enough for you.”

“Don’t talk such stuff!” He demanded some truth: “Who’s the man?”

It took her a moment to collect herself. She had always resented Teddy’s tendency to treat women with less ceremony than was the custom of the day. Often he was an unfamiliar, almost frightening young man.

“There is someone,” she admitted. “It’s someone I’ve always known slightly, but about a month ago, when I went to Southampton, I was—thrown with him.”

“Thrown from a horse?”

“Please, Teddy,” she protested gravely. “I’d been getting more unhappy about you and me, and whenever I was with him everything seemed all right.” A note of exaltation that she would not conceal came into Helen’s voice. She rose and crossed the room, her straight, slim legs outlined by the shadows of her dress. “We rode and swam and played tennis together—did the things we both liked to do.”

He stared into the vacant space she had created for him. “Is that all that drew you to this fellow?”

“No, it was more than that. He was thrilling to me like nobody ever has been.” She laughed. “I think what really started me thinking about it was one day we came in from riding and everybody said aloud what a nice pair we made.”

“Did you kiss him?”

She hesitated. “Yes, once.”

He got up from the piano stool. “I feel as if I had a cannon ball in my stomach,” he exclaimed.

The butler announced Mr. Stuart Oldhorne.

“Is he the man?” Teddy demanded tensely.

She was suddenly upset and confused. “He should have come later. Would you rather go without meeting him?”

But Stuart Oldhorne, made confident by his new sense of proprietorship, had followed the butler.

The two men regarded each other with a curious impotence of expression; there can be no communication between men in that position, for their relation is indirect and consists in how much each of them has possessed or will possess of the woman in question, so that their emotions pass through her divided self as through a bad telephone connection.

Stuart Oldhorne sat beside Helen, his polite eyes never leaving Teddy. He had the same glowing physical power as she. He had been a star athlete at Yale and a Rough Rider in Cuba, and was the best young horseman on Long Island. Women loved him not only for his points but for a real sweetness of temper.

“You’ve lived so much in Europe that I don’t often see you,” he said to Teddy. Teddy didn’t answer and Stuart Oldhorne turned to Helen: “I’m early; I didn’t realize—”

“You came at the right time,” said Teddy rather harshly. “I stayed to play you my congratulations.”

To Helen’s alarm, he turned and ran his fingers over the keyboard. Then he began. What he was playing, neither Helen nor Stuart knew, but Teddy always remembered. He put his mind in order with a short résumé of the history of music, beginning with some chords from The Messiah and ending with Debussy’s La Plus Que Lent, which had an evocative quality for him, because he had first heard it the day his brother died. Then, pausing for an instant, he began to play more thoughtfully, and the lovers on the sofa could feel that they were alone—that he had left them and had no more traffic with them—and Helen’s discomfort lessened. But the flight, the elusiveness of the music, piqued her, gave her a feeling of annoyance. If Teddy had played the current sentimental song from Erminie, and had played it with feeling, she would have understood and been moved, but he was plunging her suddenly into a world of mature emotions, whither her nature neither could nor wished to follow.

She shook herself slightly and said to Stuart: “Did you buy the horse?”

“Yes, and at a bargain… Do you know I love you?”

“I’m glad,” she whispered.

The piano stopped suddenly. Teddy closed it and swung slowly around: “Did you like my congratulations?”

“Very much,” they said together.

“It was pretty good,” he admitted. “That last was only based on a little counterpoint. You see, the idea of it was that you make such a handsome pair.”

He laughed unnaturally; Helen followed him out into the hall.

“Good-by, Teddy,” she said. “We’re going to be good friends, aren’t we?”

“Aren’t we?” he repeated. He winked without smiling, and with a clicking, despairing sound of his mouth, went out quickly.

For a moment Helen tried vainly to apply a measure to the situation, wondering how she had come off with him, realizing reluctantly that she had never for an instant held the situation in her hands. She had a dim realization that Teddy was larger in scale; then the very largeness frightened her and, with relief and a warm tide of emotion, she hurried into the drawing-room and the shelter of her lover’s arms.

Their engagement ran through a halcyon summer. Stuart visited Helen’s family at Tuxedo, and Helen visited his family in Wheatley Hills. Before breakfast, their horses’ hoofs sedately scattered the dew in sentimental glades, or curtained them with dust as they raced on dirt roads. They bought a tandem bicycle and pedaled all over Long Island—which Mrs. Cassius Ruthven, a contemporary Cato, considered “rather fast” for a couple not yet married. They were seldom at rest, but when they were, they reminded people of His Move on a Gibson pillow.

Helen’s taste for sport was advanced for her generation. She rode nearly as well as Stuart and gave him a decent game in tennis. He taught her some polo, and they were golf crazy when it was still considered a comic game. They liked to feel fit and cool together. They thought of themselves as a team, and it was often remarked how well mated they were. A chorus of pleasant envy followed in the wake of their effortless glamour.

They talked.

“It seems a pity you’ve got to go to the office,” she would say. “I wish you did something we could do together, like taming lions.”

“I’ve always thought that in a pinch I could make a living breeding and racing horses,” said Stuart.

“I know you could, you darling.”

In August he brought a Thomas automobile and toured all the way to Chicago with three other men. It was an event of national interest and their pictures were in all the papers. Helen wanted to