All the Sad Young Men by F. Scott Fitzgerald Read Free Book Online

thing--you took certain girls to certain places and spent just so much on their amusement; you drank a little, not much, more than you ought to drink, and at a certain time in the morning you stood up and said you were going home. You avoided college boys, sponges, future engagements, fights, sentiment, and indiscretions. That was the way it was done. All the rest was dissipation.
    In the morning you were never violently sorry--you made no resolutions, but if you had overdone it and your heart was slightly out of order, you went on the wagon for a few days without saying anything about it, and waited until an accumulation of nervous boredom projected you into another party.
    The lobby of the Yale Club was unpopulated. In the bar three very young alumni looked up at him, momentarily and without curiosity.
    "Hello there, Oscar," he said to the bartender. "Mr. Cahill been around this afternoon?"
    "Mr. Cahill's gone to New Haven."
    "Oh . . . that so?"
    "Gone to the ball game. Lot of men gone up."
    Anson looked once again into the lobby, considered for a moment, and then walked out and over to Fifth Avenue. From the broad window of one of his clubs--one that he had scarcely visited in five years--a gray man with watery eyes stared down at him. Anson looked quickly away--that figure sitting in vacant resignation, in supercilious solitude, depressed him. He stopped and, retracing his steps, started over 47th Street toward Teak Warden's apartment. Teak and his wife had once been his most familiar friends--it was a household where he and Dolly Karger had been used to go in the days of their affair. But Teak had taken to drink, and his wife had remarked publicly that Anson was a bad influence on him. The remark reached Anson in an exaggerated form--when it was finally cleared up, the delicate spell of intimacy was broken, never to be renewed.
    "Is Mr. Warden at home?" he inquired.
    "They've gone to the country."
    The fact unexpectedly cut at him. They were gone to the country and he hadn't known. Two years before he would have known the date, the hour, come up at the last moment for a final drink, and planned his first visit to them. Now they had gone without a word.
    Anson looked at his watch and considered a week-end with his family, but the only train was a local that would jolt through the aggressive heat for three hours. And to-morrow in the country, and Sunday--he was in no mood for porch-bridge with polite undergraduates, and dancing after dinner at a rural roadhouse, a diminutive of gaiety which his father had estimated too well.
    "Oh, no," he said to himself. . . . "No."
    He was a dignified, impressive young man, rather stout now, but otherwise unmarked by dissipation. He could have been cast for a pillar of something--at times you were sure it was not society, at others nothing else--for the law, for the church. He stood for a few minutes motionless on the sidewalk in front of a 47th Street apartment-house; for almost the first time in his life he had nothing whatever to do.
    Then he began to walk briskly up Fifth Avenue, as if he had just been reminded of an important engagement there. The necessity of dissimulation is one of the few characteristics that we share with dogs, and I think of Anson on that day as some well-bred specimen who had been disappointed at a familiar back door. He was going to see Nick, once a fashionable bartender in demand at all private dances, and now employed in cooling non-alcoholic champagne among the labyrinthine cellars of the Plaza Hotel.
    "Nick," he said, "what's happened to everything?"
    "Dead," Nick said.
    "Make me a whiskey sour." Anson handed a pint bottle over the counter. "Nick, the girls are different; I had a little girl in Brooklyn and she got married last week without letting me know."
    "That a fact? Ha-ha-ha," responded Nick diplomatically. "Slipped it over on you."
    "Absolutely," said Anson. "And I was out with her the night before."
    "Ha-ha-ha," said Nick, "ha-ha-ha!"
    "Do you