This Side of Paradise
They jolted to a stop, and Amory peered up, startled. A woman was
standing beside the road, talking to Alec at the wheel. Afterward
he remembered the harpy effect that her old kimono gave her, and
the cracked hollowness of her voice as she spoke:
“You Princeton boys?”
“Yes.”
“Well, there’s one of you killed here, and two others about
dead.”
“_My God!_”
“Look!” She pointed and they gazed in horror. Under the full
light of a roadside arc-light lay a form, face downward in a
widening circle of blood.
They sprang from the car. Amory thought of the back of that
head—that hair—that hair... and then they turned the form over.
“It’s Dick—Dick Humbird!”
“Oh, Christ!”
“Feel his heart!”
Then the insistent voice of the old crone in a sort of croaking
triumph:
“He’s quite dead, all right. The car turned over. Two of the men
that weren’t hurt just carried the others in, but this one’s no
use.”
Amory rushed into the house and the rest followed with a limp
mass that they laid on the sofa in the shoddy little front
parlor. Sloane, with his shoulder punctured, was on another
lounge. He was half delirious, and kept calling something about a
chemistry lecture at 8:10.
“I don’t know what happened,” said Ferrenby in a strained voice.
“Dick was driving and he wouldn’t give up the wheel; we told him
he’d been drinking too much—then there was this damn curve—oh, my
_God!_...” He threw himself face downward on the floor and broke
into dry sobs.
The doctor had arrived, and Amory went over to the couch, where
some one handed him a sheet to put over the body. With a sudden
hardness, he raised one of the hands and let it fall back
inertly. The brow was cold but the face not expressionless. He
looked at the shoe-laces—Dick had tied them that morning. _He_
had tied them—and now he was this heavy white mass. All that
remained of the charm and personality of the Dick Humbird he had
known—oh, it was all so horrible and unaristocratic and close to
the earth. All tragedy has that strain of the grotesque and
squalid—so useless, futile... the way animals die.... Amory was
reminded of a cat that had lain horribly mangled in some alley of
his childhood.
“Some one go to Princeton with Ferrenby.”
Amory stepped outside the door and shivered slightly at the late
night wind—a wind that stirred a broken fender on the mass of
bent metal to a plaintive, tinny sound.
CRESCENDO!
Next day, by a merciful chance, passed in a whirl. When Amory was
by himself his thoughts zigzagged inevitably to the picture of
that red mouth yawning incongruously in the white face, but with
a determined effort he piled present excitement upon the memory
of it and shut it coldly away from his mind.
Isabelle and her mother drove into town at four, and they rode up
smiling Prospect Avenue, through the gay crowd, to have tea at
Cottage. The clubs had their annual dinners that night, so at
seven he loaned her to a freshman and arranged to meet her in the
gymnasium at eleven, when the upper classmen were admitted to the
freshman dance. She was all he had expected, and he was happy and
eager to make that night the centre of every dream. At nine the
upper classes stood in front of the clubs as the freshman
torchlight parade rioted past, and Amory wondered if the
dress-suited groups against the dark, stately backgrounds and
under the flare of the torches made the night as brilliant to the
staring, cheering freshmen as it had been to him the year before.
The next day was another whirl. They lunched in a gay party of
six in a private dining-room at the club, while Isabelle and
Amory looked at each other tenderly over the fried chicken and
knew that their love was to be eternal. They danced away the prom
until five, and the stags cut in on Isabelle with joyous abandon,
which grew more and more enthusiastic as the hour grew late, and
their wines, stored in overcoat pockets in the coat room, made
old weariness wait until another day. The stag line is a most
homogeneous mass of men. It fairly sways with a single soul. A
dark-haired beauty dances by and there is a half-gasping sound as
the ripple surges forward and some one sleeker than the rest
darts out and cuts in. Then when the six-foot girl (brought by
Kaye in your class, and to whom he has been trying to introduce
you all evening) gallops by, the line surges back and the groups
face about and become intent on far corners of the hall, for
Kaye, anxious and perspiring, appears elbowing through the crowd
in search of familiar faces.
“I say, old man, I’ve got an awfully nice—”
“Sorry, Kaye, but I’m set for this one. I’ve got to cut in on a
fella.”
“Well, the next one?”
“What—ah—er—I swear I’ve got to go cut in—look me up when she’s
got a dance free.”
It delighted Amory when Isabelle suggested that they leave for a
while and drive around in her car. For a delicious hour that
passed too soon they glided the silent roads about Princeton and
talked from the surface of their hearts in shy excitement. Amory
felt strangely ingenuous and made no attempt to kiss her.
Next day they rode up through the Jersey country, had luncheon in
New York, and in the afternoon went to see a problem play at
which Isabelle wept all through the second act, rather to Amory’s
embarrassment—though it filled him with tenderness to watch her.
He was tempted to lean over and kiss away her tears, and she
slipped her hand into his under cover of darkness to be pressed
softly.
Then at six they arrived at the Borges’ summer place on Long
Island, and Amory rushed up-stairs to change into a dinner coat.
As he put in his studs he realized that he was enjoying life as
he would probably never enjoy it again. Everything was hallowed
by the haze of his own youth. He had arrived, abreast of the best
in his generation at Princeton. He was in love and his love was
returned. Turning on all the lights, he looked at himself in the
mirror, trying to find in his own face the qualities that made
him see clearer than the great crowd of people, that made him
decide firmly, and able to influence and follow his own will.
There was little in his life now that he would have changed. ...
Oxford might have been a bigger field.
Silently he admired himself. How conveniently well he looked, and
how well a dinner coat became him. He stepped into the hall and
then waited at the top of the stairs, for he heard footsteps
coming. It was Isabelle, and from the top of her shining hair to
her little golden slippers she had never seemed so beautiful.
“Isabelle!” he cried, half involuntarily, and held out his arms.
As in the story-books, she ran into them, and on that
half-minute, as their lips first touched, rested the high point
of vanity, the crest of his young egotism.
CHAPTER 3. The Egotist Considers
“Ouch! Let me go!”
He dropped his arms to his sides.
“What’s the matter?”
“Your shirt stud—it hurt me—look!” She was looking down at her
neck, where a little blue spot about the size of a pea marred its
pallor.
“Oh, Isabelle,” he reproached himself, “I’m a goopher. Really,
I’m sorry—I shouldn’t have held you so close.”
She looked up impatiently.
“Oh, Amory, of course you couldn’t help it, and it didn’t hurt
much; but what _are_ we going to do about it?”
“_Do_ about it?” he asked. “Oh—that spot; it’ll disappear in a
second.”
“It isn’t,” she said, after a moment of concentrated gazing,
“it’s still there—and it looks like Old Nick—oh, Amory, what’ll
we do! It’s _just_ the height of your shoulder.”
“Massage it,” he suggested, repressing the faintest inclination
to laugh.
She rubbed it delicately with the tips of her fingers, and then a
tear gathered in the corner of her eye, and slid down her cheek.
“Oh, Amory,” she said despairingly, lifting up a most pathetic
face, “I’ll just make my whole neck _flame_ if I rub it. What’ll
I do?”
A quotation sailed into his head and he couldn’t resist repeating
it aloud.
“All the perfumes of Arabia will not whiten this little hand.”
She looked up and the sparkle of the tear in her eye was like
ice.
“You’re not very sympathetic.”
Amory mistook her meaning.
“Isabelle, darling, I think it’ll—”
“Don’t touch me!” she cried. “Haven’t I enough on my mind and you
stand there and _laugh!_”
Then he slipped again.
“Well, it _is_ funny, Isabelle, and we were talking the other day
about a sense of humor being—”
She was looking at him with something that was not a smile,
rather the faint, mirthless echo of a smile, in the corners of
her mouth.
“Oh, shut up!” she cried suddenly, and fled down the hallway
toward her room. Amory stood there, covered with remorseful
confusion.
“Damn!”
When Isabelle reappeared she had thrown a light wrap about her
shoulders, and they descended the stairs in a silence that
endured through dinner.
“Isabelle,” he began rather testily, as they arranged themselves
in the car, bound for a dance at the Greenwich Country Club,
“you’re angry, and I’ll be, too, in a minute. Let’s kiss and make
up.”
Isabelle considered glumly.
“I hate to be laughed at,” she said finally.
“I won’t laugh any more. I’m not laughing now, am I?”
“You did.”
“Oh, don’t be so darned feminine.”
Her lips curled slightly.
“I’ll be anything I want.”
Amory kept his temper with difficulty. He became aware that he
had not an ounce of real affection for Isabelle, but her coldness
piqued him. He wanted to kiss her, kiss her a lot, because then
he knew he could leave in the morning and not care. On the
contrary, if he didn’t kiss her, it would worry him.... It would
interfere vaguely with his idea of himself as a conqueror. It
wasn’t dignified to come off second best, _pleading_, with a
doughty warrior like Isabelle.
Perhaps she suspected this. At any rate, Amory watched the night
that should have been the consummation of romance glide by with
great moths overhead and the heavy fragrance of roadside gardens,
but without those broken words, those little sighs....
Afterward they suppered on ginger ale and devil’s food in the
pantry, and Amory announced a decision.
“I’m leaving early in the morning.”
“Why?”
“Why not?” he countered.
“There’s no need.”
“However, I’m going.”
“Well, if you insist on being ridiculous—”
“Oh, don’t put it that way,” he objected.
“—just because I won’t let you kiss me. Do you think—”
“Now, Isabelle,” he interrupted, “you know it’s not that—even
suppose it is. We’ve reached the stage where we either ought to
kiss—or—or—nothing. It isn’t as if you were refusing on moral
grounds.”