and McIntyre took a step toward him.
“You long-winded dude. You got our land—take that for Peter Carhart!”
He swung from the shoulder quick as lightning and down went Samuel in a heap. Dimly he heard steps in the doorway and knew that some one was holding McIntyre, but there was no need. The rancher had sunk down in his chair, and dropped his head in his hands.
Samuel’s brain was whirring. He realized that the fourth fist had hit him, and a great flood of emotion cried out that the law that had inexorably ruled his life was in motion again. In a half-daze he got up and strode from the room.
The next ten minutes were perhaps the hardest of his life. People talk of the courage of convictions, but in actual life a man’s duty to his family may make a rigid course seem a selfish indulgence of his own righteousness. Samuel thought mostly of his family, yet he never really wavered. That jolt had brought him to.
When he came back in the room there were a lot of worried faces waiting for him, but he didn’t waste any time explaining.
“Gentlemen,” he said, “Mr. McIntyre has been kind enough to convince me that in this matter you are absolutely right, and the Peter Carhart interests absolutely wrong. As far as I am concerned you can keep your ranches to the rest of your days.”
He pushed his way through an astounded gathering, and within a half-hour he had sent two telegrams that staggered the operator into complete unfitness for business; one was to Hamil in San Antonio; one was to Peter Carhart in New York.
Samuel didn’t sleep much that night. He knew that for the first time in his business career he had made a dismal, miserable failure. But some instinct in him, stronger than will, deeper than training, had forced him to do what would probably end his ambitions and his happiness. But it was done and it never occurred to him that he could have acted otherwise.
Next morning two telegrams were waiting for him. The first was from Hamil. It contained three words:
“You blamed idiot!”
The second was from New York:
“Deal off come to New York immediately Carhart.”
Within a week things had happened. Hamil quarrelled furiously and violently defended his scheme. He was summoned to New York, and spent a bad half-hour on the carpet in Peter Carhart’s office. He broke with the Carhart interests in July, and in August Samuel Meredith, at thirty-five years old, was, to all intents, made Carhart’s partner. The fourth fist had done its work.
I suppose that there’s a caddish streak in every man that runs crosswise across his character and disposition and general outlook. With some men it’s secret and we never know it’s there until they strike us in the dark one night. But Samuel’s showed when it was in action, and the sight of it made people see red. He was rather lucky in that, because every time his little devil came up it met a reception that sent it scurrying down below in a sickly, feeble condition. It was the same devil, the same streak that made him order Gilly’s friends off the bed, that made him go inside Marjorie’s house.
If you could run your hand along Samuel Meredith’s jaw you’d feel a lump. He admits he’s never been sure which fist left it there, but he wouldn’t lose it for anything. He says there’s no cad like an old cad, and that sometimes just before making a decision, it’s a great help to stroke his chin. The reporters call it a nervous characteristic, but it’s not that. It’s so he can feel again the gorgeous clarity, the lightning sanity of those four fists.
— ◆ —
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD
Stories 1920–25.
[The texts follow the Cambridge Edition, James L. W. West III, ed., Cambridge University Press 2000–07.]
STORIES 1920–25
— ◇ —
Diamond Dick and the First Law of Woman.
Myra Meets his Family.
The Saturday Evening Post (20 March 1920)
Probably every boy who has attended an Eastern college in the last ten years has met Myra half a dozen times, for the Myras live on the Eastern colleges, as kittens live on warm milk. When Myra is young, seventeen or so, they call her a “wonderful kid”; in her prime—say, at nineteen—she is tendered the subtle compliment of being referred to by her name alone; and after that she is a “prom-trotter” or “the famous coast-to-coast Myra.”
You can see her practically any winter afternoon if you stroll through the Biltmore lobby. She will be standing in a group of sophomores just in from Princeton or New Haven, trying to decide whether to dance away the mellow hours at the Club de Vingt or the Plaza Rose Room. Afterward one of the sophomores will take her to the theatre and ask her down to the February prom—and then dive for a taxi to catch the last train back to college.
Invariably she has a somnolent mother sharing a suite with her on one of the floors above.
When Myra is about twenty-four she thinks over all the nice boys she might have married at one time or other, sighs a little and does
