Your Way and Mine, F. Scott Fitzgerald
One spring afternoon in the first year of the present century a young man was experimenting with a new typewriter in a brokerage office on lower Broadway. At his elbow lay an eight-line letter and he was endeavoring to make a copy on the machine but each attempt was marred by a monstrous capital rising unexpectedly in the middle of a word or by the disconcerting intrusion of some symbol such as $ or % into an alphabet whose membership was set at twenty-six many years ago. Whenever he detected a mistake he made a new beginning with a fresh sheet but after the fifteenth try he was aware of a ferocious instinct to cast the machine from the window.
The young man’s short blunt fingers were too big for the keys. He was big all over; indeed his bulky body seemed to be in the very process of growth for it had ripped his coat at the back seam, while his trousers clung to thigh and calf like skin tights. His hair was yellow and tousled—you could see the paths of his broad fingers in it—and his eyes were of a hard brilliant blue but the lids drooping a little over them reinforced an impression of lethargy that the clumsy body conveyed. His age was twenty-one.
“What do you think the eraser’s for, McComas?”
The young man looked around.
“What’s that?” he demanded brusquely.
“The eraser,” repeated the short alert human fox who had come in the outer door and paused behind him. “That there’s a good copy except for one word. Use your head or you’ll be sitting there until tomorrow.”
The human fox moved on into his private office. The young man sat for a moment, motionless, sluggish. Suddenly he grunted, picked up the eraser referred to and flung it savagely out of the window.
Twenty minutes later he opened the door of his employer’s office. In his hand was the letter, immaculately typed, and the addressed envelope.
“Here it is, sir,” he said, frowning a little from his late concentration.
The human fox took it, glanced at it and then looked at McComas with a peculiar smile.
“You didn’t use the eraser?”
“No, I didn’t, Mr. Woodley.”
“You’re one of those thorough young men, aren’t you?” said the fox sarcastically.
“What?”
“I said ‘thorough’ but since you weren’t listening I’ll change it to ‘pig-headed.’ Whose time did you waste just to avoid a little erasure that the best typists aren’t too proud to make? Did you waste your time or mine?”
“I wanted to make one good copy,” answered McComas steadily.
“You see, I never worked a typewriter before.”
“Answer my question,” snapped Mr. Woodley. “When you sat there making two dozen copies of that letter were you wasting your time or mine?”
“It was mostly my lunch time,” McComas replied, his big face flushing to an angry pink. “I’ve got to do things my own way or not at all.”
For answer Mr. Woodley picked up the letter and envelope, folded them, tore them once and again and dropped the pieces into the wastepaper basket with a toothy little smile.
“That’s my way,” he announced. “What do you think of that?”
Young McComas had taken a step forward as if to snatch the fragments from the fox’s hand.
“By golly,” he cried. “By golly. Why, for two cents I’d spank you!”
With an angry snarl Mr. Woodley sprang to his feet, fumbled in his pocket and threw a handful of change upon his desk.
Ten minutes later the outside man coming in to report perceived that neither young McComas nor his hat were in their usual places. But in the private office he found Mr. Woodley, his face crimson and foam bubbling between his teeth, shouting frantically into the telephone. The outside man noticed to his surprise that Mr. Woodley was in daring dishabille and that there were six suspender buttons scattered upon the office floor.
In 1902 Henry McComas weighed 196 pounds. In 1905 when he journeyed back to his home town, Elmira, to marry the love of his boyhood he tipped accurate beams at 210. His weight remained constant for two years but after the panic of 1907 it bounded to 220, about which comfortable figure it was apparently to hover for the rest of his life.
He looked mature beyond his years—under certain illuminations his yellow hair became a dignified white—and his bulk added to the impression of authority that he gave. During his first five years off the farm there was never a time when he wasn’t scheming to get into business for himself.
For a temperament like Henry McComas’, which insisted on running at a pace of its own, independence was an utter necessity. He must make his own rules, willy-nilly, even though he join the ranks of those many abject failures who have also tried. Just one week after he had achieved his emancipation from other people’s hierarchies he was moved to expound his point to Theodore Drinkwater, his partner—this because Drinkwater had wondered aloud if he intended never to come downtown before eleven.
“I doubt it,” said McComas.
“What’s the idea?” demanded Drinkwater indignantly. “What do you think the effect’s going to be on our office force?”
“Does Miss Johnston show any sign of being demoralized?”
“I mean after we get more people. It isn’t as if you were an old man, Mac, with your work behind you. You’re only twenty-eight, not a day older than I. What’ll you do at forty?”
“I’ll be downtown at eleven o’clock,” said McComas, “every working day of my life.”
Later in the week one of their first clients invited them to lunch at a celebrated business club; the club’s least member was a rajah of the swelling, expanding empire.
“Look around, Ted,” whispered McComas as they left the dining-room. “There’s a man looks like a prize-fighter, and there’s one who looks like a ham actor. That’s a plumber there behind you; there’s a coal heaver and a couple of cowboys—do you see? There’s a chronic invalid and a confidence man, a pawn-broker—that one on the right. By golly, where are all the big business men we came to see?”
The route back to their office took them by a small restaurant where the clerks of the district flocked to lunch.
“Take a look at them, Ted, and you’ll find the men who know the rules—and think and act and look like just what they are.”
“I suppose if they put on pink mustaches and came to work at five in the afternoon they’d get to be great men,” scoffed Drinkwater.
“Posing is exactly what I don’t mean. Just accept yourself. We’re brought up on fairy stories about the new leaf, but who goes on believing them except those who have to believe and have to hope or else go crazy. I think America will be a happier country when the individual begins to look his personal limitations in the face. Anything that’s in your character at twenty-one is usually there to stay.”
In any case what was in Henry McComas’ was there to stay. Henry McComas wouldn’t dine with a client in a bad restaurant for a proposition of three figures, wouldn’t hurry his luncheon for a proposition of four, wouldn’t go without it for a proposition of five. And in spite of these peculiarities the exporting firm in which he owned forty-nine per cent of the stock began to pepper South America with locomotives, dynamos, barb wire, hydraulic engines, cranes, mining machinery, and other appurtenances of civilization. In 1913 when Henry McComas was thirty-four he owned a house on Ninety-second Street and calculated that his income for the next year would come to thirty thousand dollars. And because of a sudden and unexpected demand from Europe which was not for pink lemonade, it came to twice that. The buying agent for the British Government arrived, followed by the buying agents for the French, Belgian, Russian and Serbian Governments, and a share of the commodities required were assembled under the stewardship of Drinkwater and McComas. There was a chance that they would be rich men. Then suddenly this eventually began to turn on the woman Henry McComas had married.
Stella McComas was the daughter of a small hay and grain dealer of upper New York. Her father was unlucky and always on the verge of failure, so she grew up in the shadow of worry. Later, while Henry McComas got his start in New York, she earned her living by teaching physical culture in the public schools of Utica. In consequence she brought to her marriage a belief in certain stringent rules for the care of the body and an exaggerated fear of adversity.
For the first years she was so impressed with her husband’s rapid rise and so absorbed in her babies that she accepted Henry as something infallible and protective, outside the scope of her provincial wisdom. But as her little girl grew into short dresses and hair ribbons, and her little boy into the custody of an English nurse she had more time to look closely at her husband. His leisurely ways, his corpulency, his sometimes maddening deliberateness, ceased to be the privileged idiosyncrasies of success, and became only facts.
For a while he paid no great attention to her little suggestions as to his diet, her occasional crankiness as to his hours, her invidious comparisons between his habits and the fancied habits of other men. Then one morning a peculiar lack of taste in his coffee precipitated the matter into the light.
“I can’t drink the stuff—it hasn’t had any taste for a week,” he complained. “And why is it brought in a cup from the kitchen? I like to put the cream and
