“Hello!” he said again. He had turned round the camel’s marriage license, which he had been holding upside down, produced spectacles and was studying it intently.

  “Why,” he exclaimed, and in the pervading silence his words were heard plainly by everyone in the room, “this yeah’s a sho-nuff marriage permit.”

  “What?”

  “Huh?”

  “Say it again, Jumbo!”

  “Sure you can read?”

  Jumbo waved them to silence and Perry’s blood burned to fire in his veins as he realized the break he had made.

  “Yassuh!” repeated Jumbo. “This yeah’s a sho-nuff license, and the pa’ties concerned one of ‘em is dis yeah young lady, Miz Betty Medill, and th’ other’s Mistah Perry Pa’khurst.”

  There was a general gasp, and a low rumble broke out as all eyes fell on the camel. Betty shrank away from him quickly, her tawny eyes giving out sparks of fury.

  “Is you Mistah Pa’khurst, you camel?”

  Perry made no answer. The crowd pressed up closer and stared at him as he stood frozen rigid with embarrassment, his cardboard face still hungry and sardonic, regarding the ominous Jumbo.

  “You-all bettah speak up!” said Jumbo slowly, “this yeah’s a mighty serous mattah. Outside mah duties at this club ah happens to be a sho-nuff minister in the Firs’ Cullud Baptis’ Church. It done look to me as though you-all is gone an’ got married.”

  V

  The scene that followed will go down forever in the annals of the Tallyho Club. Stout matrons fainted, strong men swore, wild-eyed débutantes babbled in lightning groups instantly formed and instantly dissolved, and a great buzz of chatter, virulent yet oddly subdued, hummed through the chaotic ballroom. Feverish youths swore they would kill Perry or Jumbo or themselves or someone and the Baptis’ preacheh was besieged by a tempestuous covey, of clamorous amateur lawyers, asking questions, making threats, demanding precedents, ordering the bonds annulled, and especially trying to ferret out any hint or suspicion of prearrangement in what had occurred.

  In the corner Mrs. Townsend was crying softly on the shoulder of Mr. Howard Tate, who was trying vainly to comfort her; they were exchanging “all my fault’s” volubly and voluminously. Outside on a snow covered walk Mr. Cyrus Medill, the Aluminum Man, was being paced slowly up and down between two brawny charioteers, giving vent now to a grunt, now to a string of unrepeatables, now to wild pleadings that they’d just let him get at Jumbo. He was facetiously attired for the evening as a wild man of Borneo, and the most exacting stage manager after one look at his face would have acknowledged that any improvement in casting the part would have been quite impossible.

  Meanwhile the two principals held the real center of the stage. Betty Medill—or was it Betty Parkhurst? —weeping furiously, was surrounded by the plainer girls—the prettier ones were too busy talking about her to pay much attention to her—and over on the other side of the hall stood the camel, still intact except for his headpiece, which dangled pathetically on his chest. Perry was earnestly engaged in making protestations of his innocence to a ring of angry, puzzled men. Every few minutes just as he had apparently proved his ease someone would mention the marriage certificate, and the inquisition would begin again.

  A girl named Marion Cloud, considered the second best belle of Toledo, changed the gist of the situation by a remark she made to Betty.

  “Well,” she said maliciously, “it’ll all blow over, dear. The courts will annul it without question.”

  Betty’s tears dried miraculously in her eyes, her lips shut tightly together, and she flashed a withering glance at Marion. Then she rose and scattering her sympathizers right and left walked directly across the room to Perry, who also rose and stood looking at her in terror. Again silence crept down upon the room.

  “Will you have the decency,” she said, “to grant me five minutes’ conversation—or wasn’t that included in your plans?”

  He nodded, his mouth unable to form words.

  Indicating coldly that he was to follow her she walked out into the hall with her chin uptilted and headed for the privacy of one of the little card rooms.

  Perry started after her, but was brought to a jerky halt by the failure of his hind legs to function.

  “You stay here!” he commanded savagely.

  “I can’t,” whined a voice from the hump, “unless you get out first and let me get out.”

  Perry hesitated, but the curious crowd was unbearable, and unable any longer to tolerate eyes he muttered a command and with as much dignity as possible the camel moved carefully out on its four legs.

  Betty was waiting for him.

  “Well,” she began furiously, “you see what you’ve done! You and that crazy license! I told you you shouldn’t have gotten it! I told you!”

  “My dear girl, I—“

  “Don’t dear-girl me! Save that for your real wife if you ever get one after this disgraceful performance. And don’t try to pretend it wasn’t all arranged. You know you gave that colored waiter money! You know you did! Do you mean to say you didn’t try to marry me?”

  “No—I mean, yes—of course —”

  “Yes, you’d better admit it! You tried it, what are you going to do? Do you know my father’s nearly crazy? It’ll serve you right if he tries to kill you. He’ll take his gun and put some cold steel in you. O-o-oh! Even if this marr —this thing can be annulled it’ll hang over me all the rest of my life!”

  Perry could not resist quoting softly: “’Oh, camel, wouldn’t you like to belong to the pretty snake charmer for all your —’ “

  “Shut up!” cried Betty.

  There was a pause.

  “Betty,” said Perry finally with a very faint hopefulness, “there’s only one thing to do that will really get us out clear. That’s for you to marry me.”

  “Marry you!”

  “Yes. Really it’s the only—”

  “You shut up! I wouldn’t marry you if—if—”

  “I know. If I were the last man on earth. But if you care anything about your reputation —”

  “Reputation!” she cried. “You’re a nice one to think about my reputation now. Why didn’t you think about my reputation before you hired that horrible Jumbo to—to—”

  Perry tossed up his hands hopelessly. “Very well. I’ll do anything you want. Lord knows I renounce all claims!”

  “But,” said a new voice, “I don’t.”

  Perry and Betty started, and she put her hand to her heart.

  “For heaven’s sake, what was that?”

  “It’s me,” said the camel’s back.

  In a minute Perry had whipped off the camel’s skin, and a lax, limp object, his clothes hanging on him damply, his hand clenched tightly on an almost empty bottle, stood defiantly before them.

  “Oh,” cried Betty, tears starting again to her eyes, “you brought that object in here to frighten me! You told me he was deaf—that awful person!”

  The ex-camel’s back sat down on a chair with a sigh of satisfaction.

  “Don’t talk ‘at way about me, lady. I ain’t no person. I’m your husband.”

  “Husband!”

  The cry was wrung simultaneously from Betty and Perry.

  “Why, sure. I’m as much your husband as that gink is. The smoke didn’t marry you to the camel’s front. He married you to the whole camel. Why, that’s my ring you got on your finger!”

  With a little cry she snatched the ring from her finger and flung it passionately at the floor.

  “What’s all this?” demanded Perry dazedly.

  “Jes’ that you better fix me an’ fix me right. If you don’t I’m a-gonna have the same claim you got to bein’ married to her!”

  “That’s bigamy,” said Perry, turning gravely to Betty.

  Then came the supreme moment of Perry’s early life, the ultimate chance on which he risked his fortunes. He rose and looked first at Betty, where she sat weakly, her face aghast at this new complication, and then at the individual who swayed from side to side on his chair, uncertainly yet menacingly.

  “Very well,” said Perry slowly to the individual, “you can have her. Betty, I’m going to prove to you that as far as I’m concerned our marriage was entirely accidental. I’m going to renounce utterly my rights to have you as my wife, and give you to—to the man whose ring you wear—your lawful husband.”

  There was a pause and four horrorstricken eyes were turned on him.

  “Good-by, Betty,” he said brokenly. “Don’t forget me in your new-found happiness. I’m going to leave for the far west on the morning train. Think of me kindly, Betty.”

  With a last glance at them he turned on his heel and his head bowed on his chest as his hand touched the door knob.

  “Good-by,” he repeated. He turned the door knob.

  But at these words a flying bundle of snakes and silk and tawny hair hurled itself at him.

  “Oh, Perry, don’t leave me! I can’t face it alone! Perry, Perry, take me with you!”

  Her tears rained down in a torrent and flowed damply on his neck. Calmly he folded his arms about her.

  “I don’t care,” she cried tearfully. “I love you and if you can wake up a minister at this hour and have it done over again I’ll go West with you.”

  Over her shoulder the front part of the camel looked at the back part of the camel—and they exchanged a particularly subtle, esoteric sort of wink that only true camels can understand.

  “Bernice Bobs Her Hair” was first time that The Saturday Evening Post used an illustration from a Fitzgerald story for their cover. It was an auspicious debut – the illustrator was Norman Rockwell. The story was published May 1, 1920 and Fitzgerald’s fee was $500.

  To date, Bernice has been filmed twice. The first production aired on live television, May 17, 1951. It was part of a CBS anthology series, Starlight Theatre, and starred a very young Julie Harris as Bernice.

  Bernice came to television a second time on October 6, 1976, as part of the American Short Story Collection on PBS. Directed by Joan Micklin Silver, it starred Shelley Duvall and Veronica Cartwright.

  Two stage versions exist -- a one-act written by D. D. Brooke, intended for junior high audiences, and a full-length musical version, created by Adam Gwon and Julia Jordan.

  Bernice Bobs Her Hair

  After dark on Saturday night one could stand on the first tee of the golf course and see the country club windows as a yellow expanse over a very black and wavy ocean. The waves of this ocean, so to speak, were the heads of many curious caddies, a few of the more ingenious chauffeurs, the golf professional’s deaf sister—and there were usually several stray, diffident waves who might have rolled inside had they so desired. This was the gallery.

  The balcony was inside. It consisted of the circle of wicker chairs that lined the wall of the combination clubroom and ballroom. At these Saturday-night dances it was largely feminine; a great babel of middle- aged ladies with sharp eyes and icy hearts behind lorgnettes and large bosoms. The main function of the balcony was critical. It occasionally showed grudging admiration, but never approval, for it is well known among ladies over thirty-five that when the younger set dance in the summer time it is with the very worst intentions in the world, and if they are not bombarded with stony eyes stray couples will dance weird barbaric interludes in the corners, and the more popular, more dangerous girls will sometimes be kissed in the parked limousine of unsuspecting dowagers.

  But after all, this critical circle is not close enough to the stage to see the actors’ faces and catch the subtler byplay. It can only frown and lean, ask questions and make satisfactory deductions from its set of postulates, such as the one which states that every young man with a large income leads the life of a hunted partridge. It never really appreciates the drama of the shifting, semi-cruel world of adolescence. No; boxes, orchestra circle, principals and chorus are represented by the medley of faces and voices that sway to the plaintive African rhythm of Dyer’s dance orchestra.

  From sixteen-year-old Otis Ormonde, who has two more years at Hill School, to G. Reece Stoddard, over whose bureau at home hangs a Harvard law diploma; from little Madeleine Hogue, whose hair still feels strange and uncomfortable on top of her head, to Bessie MacRae, who has been the life of the party a little too long—more than ten years—the medley is not only the center of the stage but contains the only people capable of getting an unobstructed view of it.

  With a flourish and a bang the music stops. The couples exchange artificial, effortless smiles, facetiously repeat “la-de-da-dadum-dum,” and then the clatter of young feminine voices soars over the burst of clapping.

  A few disappointed stags caught in mid-floor as they had been about to cut in subsided listlessly back to the walls, because this was not like the riotous Christmas dances. These summer hops were considered just pleasantly warm and exciting, where even the younger marrieds rose and performed ancient waltzes and terrifying fox trots to the tolerant amusement of their younger brothers and sisters.

  Warren McIntyre, who casually attended Yale, being one of the unfortunate stags, felt in his dinner-coat pocket for a cigarette and strolled out onto the wide, semi-dark veranda, where couples were scattered at tables, filling the lantern-hung night with vague words and hazy laughter. He nodded here and there at the less absorbed and as he passed each couple some half-forgotten fragment of a story played in his mind, for it was not a large city and everyone was Who’s Who to everyone else’s past. There, for example, were Jim Strain and Ethel Demorest, who had been privately engaged for three years. Everyone knew that as soon as Jim managed to hold a job for more than two months she would marry him. Yet how bored they both looked and how wearily Ethel regarded Jim sometimes, as if she wondered why she had trained the vines of her affection on such a wind-shaken poplar.

  Warren was nineteen and rather pitying with those of his friends who hadn’t gone East to college. But like most boys he bragged tremendously about the girls of his city when he was away from it. There was Genevieve Ormonde, who regularly made the rounds of dances, house parties and football games at Princeton, Yale, Williams and Cornell; there was black-eyed Roberta Dillon, who was quite as famous to her own generation as Hiram Johnson or Ty Cobb; and, of course, there was Marjorie Harvey, who besides having a fairylike face and a dazzling, bewildering tongue was already justly celebrated for having turned five cart wheels in succession during the last pump-and-slipper dance at New Haven.

  Warren, who had grown up across the street from Marjorie, had long been wildly in love with her. Sometimes she seemed to reciprocate his feelings with a faint gratitude, but she had tried him by her infallible test and informed him gravely that she did not love him. Her test was that when she was away from him she forgot him and had affairs with other boys. Warren found this discouraging, especially as Marjorie had been making little trips all summer, and for the first two or three days after each arrival home he saw great heaps of mail on the Harveys’ hall table addressed to her in various masculine handwritings. To make matters worse, all during the month of August she had been visited by her cousin Bernice from Eau Claire, and it seemed impossible to see her alone. It was always necessary to hunt round and find someone to take care of Bernice. As August waned this was becoming more and more difficult.

  Much as Warren loved Marjorie, he had to admit that Cousin Bernice was sorta hopeless. She was pretty, with dark hair and high color, but she was no fun on a party.

  Every Sunday night he danced a long arduous duty dance with her to please Marjorie, but he had never been anything but bored in her company. “Warren”—a soft voice at his elbow broke in upon his thoughts, and he turned to see Marjorie, flushed and radiant as usual. She laid a hand on his shoulder and a glow settled almost imperceptibly over him.

  “Warren,” she whispered, “do something for me—dance with Bernice. She’s been stuck with little Otis Ormonde for almost an hour.”

  Warren’s glow faded.

  “Why—sure,” he answered half-heartedly.

  “You don’t mind, do you? I’ll see that you don’t get stuck.”

  “’S’all right.”

  Marjorie smiled—that smile that was thanks enough. “You’re an angel, and I’m obliged loads.”

  With a sigh the angel glanced round the veranda, but Bernice and Otis were not in sight. He wandered back inside, and there in front of the women’s dressing room he found Otis in the center of a group of young men who were convulsed with laughter. Otis was brandishing a piece of timber he had picked up, and discoursing volubly wildly.

  “She’s gone in to fix her hair,” he announced wildly. “I’m waiting to dance another hour with her.”

  Their laughter was renewed.

  “Why don’t some of you cut in?” cried Otis resentfully. “She likes more variety.”

  “Why, Otis,” suggested a friend, “you’ve just barely got used to her.”

  “Why the two-by-four, Otis?” inquired Warren, smiling.

  “The two-by-four? Oh, this? This is a club. When she comes out I’ll hit her on the head and knock her in again.”

  Warren collapsed on a settee and howled with glee.

  “Never mind, Otis,” he articulated finally “I’m relieving you this time.”

  Otis simulated a sudden fainting attack and handed the stick to Warren.

  “If you need it, old man,” he said hoarsely.

  No matter how beautiful or brilliant a girl may be, the reputation of not being frequently cut in on makes her position at a dance unfortunate. Perhaps boys prefer her company to that of the butterflies with whom they dance a dozen times an evening, but youth in this jazz-nourished generation is temperamentally restless, fox trotting more than one full fox trot with the same girl is distasteful, not to say odious. When it comes to several dances and the intermissions between she can be quite sure that a young man, once relieved, will never tread on her wayward toes again.