Bryan Dalyrimple
The decorated war hero of “Dalyrimple Goes Wrong,” who comes home to nothing and decides that good and evil are in his way.
To get out of the rut he is in. He says so aloud, sitting on a box in an empty aisle of the stock room, and the narration notes that he does not mean only out of the grocery house.
The book
At a glance
- The central character of “Dalyrimple Goes Wrong,” the seventh of the eight stories
- Twenty-three
- A Lewis gun and nine days behind the retreating German lines, and a row of medals for it
- The stock room of the Theron G. Macy Company, wholesale grocers, at forty dollars a month
- Burglar Bill of the Silver District, after five burglaries were attributed to him. He had committed three and took the title anyway
Who they are in the book
Spoiler-freeBryan Dalyrimple is the central character of “Dalyrimple Goes Wrong,” the seventh story in Flappers and Philosophers and the coldest. He is twenty-three, came back from the First World War with a row of medals for nine days behind the German lines with a machine gun, and was met at the dock by the governor of his state and a citizens' committee. A month later he has fourteen dollars, no job, and a mayor's wife who has been hinting him out of the spare room for a week.
He takes the only work he can find, in the stock room of the largest wholesale grocery house in town, at forty dollars a month with the promise of the road later. The promise is the same one they give everybody. When he finds on a ledger that the owner's weak-chinned nephew started at sixty and was in the office within three weeks, he walks out into the rain and thinks his way to a conclusion.
How the book draws them
- The homecoming, and the end of itNewspaper photographers, old ladies with red-rimmed eyes, girls who had not remembered him so well since his father's business failed. Then he overhears the upstairs maid telling the cook that the mayor's wife has spent a week trying to get rid of him, and he leaves at eleven o'clock in intolerable confusion.
- Asking for the jobHe finds he cannot say the words plainly: “Why — this question of a job.” The phrase seemed somehow more clothed, the narration says, than just a job. In the corridor afterwards, with his forehead wet in a room that had not been hot, he asks himself: “Why the devil did I thank the son of a gun?”
- The man he is afraid of becomingCharley Moore, twenty-six, four years in the same stock room at sixty a month, who was told he would go on the road once he learned the stock and says that is what they tell everybody. Fitzgerald's line for him is exact: “that faint musk of weakness hanging about him that is often mistaken for the scent of evil.”
- The ledgerWaiting in the office, he idly turns a page and finds a salary list with his own name near the top and the owner's nephew four lines down at sixty dollars. He works out what the next twenty years look like, says “I won’t!” aloud, and startles the bookkeeper.
- The conclusion, in the rainWalking out past the last houses in the dark, he takes apart the childhood principle that success comes from duty and that evil is punished. What he arrives at: “When I want something bad enough, common sense tells me to go and take it — and not get caught.” Then he works out what he wants first, which is fifteen dollars for his overdue board bill.
- The first robberyHe cuts a five-inch square out of his coat lining with a knife, makes two eye-holes, ties it on under his hat, and waits behind a hedge. He lets a woman and a labourer pass. “Put up your hands!” The man he does stop gets sent running down the street with instructions to stamp loudly, and Dalyrimple stands there laughing.
- The false teethA set of false teeth comes out of the second burglary, and they worry him more than anything else does. He imagines somebody groping for them at dawn, a soft breakfast, a lisping call to the police station. He wraps them in brown paper, prints FALSE TEETH on the parcel, and throws it onto the lawn near the front door.
- What he decides about himselfSo long as he keeps his imagination at white heat he can make his own emancipation sound magnificent; the moment he lets his thoughts wander, the horrors arrive. He gives up thinking of himself as a rebel, on the ground that it is more consoling to think of everyone else as a fool.
Nothing happens to him. Four months in, his employer sends him to see the biggest political influence in the city, a man named Alfred J. Fraser, who has been watching him since the speech he made the previous Fourth of July in response to a loving-cup, and has decided he is solid rather than a loafer — because Macy reported that after an early spell of restlessness the young man shut up and stuck to the job. Fraser tells him he is going to put him in the state senate, and makes clear that the newspapers will take care of the reputation provided he has no ideas of his own about how things ought to be run.
Dalyrimple accepts. The last thing in the story is his employer coming through the curtains, shaking his hand and saying he is glad they are to be on the same side of the fence — the phrase Dalyrimple had been repeating to himself for weeks. He thanks him, and feels a whimsical moisture gathering back of his eyes.