This Side of Paradise
“Where?” cried Sloane. “We’ll have him thrown out!” He rose to
his feet and swayed back and forth, clinging to his chair. “Where
is he?”
Axia and Phoebe suddenly leaned and whispered to each other
across the table, and before Amory realized it they found
themselves on their way to the door.
“Where now?”
“Up to the flat,” suggested Phoebe. “We’ve got brandy and
fizz—and everything’s slow down here to-night.”
Amory considered quickly. He hadn’t been drinking, and decided
that if he took no more, it would be reasonably discreet for him
to trot along in the party. In fact, it would be, perhaps, the
thing to do in order to keep an eye on Sloane, who was not in a
state to do his own thinking. So he took Axia’s arm and, piling
intimately into a taxicab, they drove out over the hundreds and
drew up at a tall, white-stone apartment-house. ... Never would
he forget that street.... It was a broad street, lined on both
sides with just such tall, white-stone buildings, dotted with
dark windows; they stretched along as far as the eye could see,
flooded with a bright moonlight that gave them a calcium pallor.
He imagined each one to have an elevator and a colored hall-boy
and a key-rack; each one to be eight stories high and full of
three and four room suites. He was rather glad to walk into the
cheeriness of Phoebe’s living-room and sink onto a sofa, while
the girls went rummaging for food.
“Phoebe’s great stuff,” confided Sloane, sotto voce.
“I’m only going to stay half an hour,” Amory said sternly. He
wondered if it sounded priggish.
“Hell y’ say,” protested Sloane. “We’re here now—don’t le’s
rush.”
“I don’t like this place,” Amory said sulkily, “and I don’t want
any food.”
Phoebe reappeared with sandwiches, brandy bottle, siphon, and
four glasses.
“Amory, pour ’em out,” she said, “and we’ll drink to Fred Sloane,
who has a rare, distinguished edge.”
“Yes,” said Axia, coming in, “and Amory. I like Amory.” She sat
down beside him and laid her yellow head on his shoulder.
“I’ll pour,” said Sloane; “you use siphon, Phoebe.”
They filled the tray with glasses.
“Ready, here she goes!”
Amory hesitated, glass in hand.
There was a minute while temptation crept over him like a warm
wind, and his imagination turned to fire, and he took the glass
from Phoebe’s hand. That was all; for at the second that his
decision came, he looked up and saw, ten yards from him, the man
who had been in the cafe, and with his jump of astonishment the
glass fell from his uplifted hand. There the man half sat, half
leaned against a pile of pillows on the corner divan. His face
was cast in the same yellow wax as in the cafe, neither the dull,
pasty color of a dead man—rather a sort of virile pallor—nor
unhealthy, you’d have called it; but like a strong man who’d
worked in a mine or done night shifts in a damp climate. Amory
looked him over carefully and later he could have drawn him after
a fashion, down to the merest details. His mouth was the kind
that is called frank, and he had steady gray eyes that moved
slowly from one to the other of their group, with just the shade
of a questioning expression. Amory noticed his hands; they
weren’t fine at all, but they had versatility and a tenuous
strength... they were nervous hands that sat lightly along the
cushions and moved constantly with little jerky openings and
closings. Then, suddenly, Amory perceived the feet, and with a
rush of blood to the head he realized he was afraid. The feet
were all wrong ... with a sort of wrongness that he felt rather
than knew.... It was like weakness in a good woman, or blood on
satin; one of those terrible incongruities that shake little
things in the back of the brain. He wore no shoes, but, instead,
a sort of half moccasin, pointed, though, like the shoes they
wore in the fourteenth century, and with the little ends curling
up. They were a darkish brown and his toes seemed to fill them to
the end.... They were unutterably terrible....
He must have said something, or looked something, for Axia’s
voice came out of the void with a strange goodness.
“Well, look at Amory! Poor old Amory’s sick—old head going
’round?”
“Look at that man!” cried Amory, pointing toward the corner
divan.
“You mean that purple zebra!” shrieked Axia facetiously. “Ooo-ee!
Amory’s got a purple zebra watching him!”
Sloane laughed vacantly.
“Ole zebra gotcha, Amory?”
There was a silence.... The man regarded Amory quizzically....
Then the human voices fell faintly on his ear:
“Thought you weren’t drinking,” remarked Axia sardonically, but
her voice was good to hear; the whole divan that held the man was
alive; alive like heat waves over asphalt, like wriggling
worms....
“Come back! Come back!” Axia’s arm fell on his. “Amory, dear, you
aren’t going, Amory!” He was half-way to the door.
“Come on, Amory, stick ’th us!”
“Sick, are you?”
“Sit down a second!”
“Take some water.”
“Take a little brandy....”
The elevator was close, and the colored boy was half asleep,
paled to a livid bronze... Axia’s beseeching voice floated down
the shaft. Those feet... those feet...
As they settled to the lower floor the feet came into view in the
sickly electric light of the paved hall.
IN THE ALLEY
Down the long street came the moon, and Amory turned his back on
it and walked. Ten, fifteen steps away sounded the footsteps.
They were like a slow dripping, with just the slightest
insistence in their fall. Amory’s shadow lay, perhaps, ten feet
ahead of him, and soft shoes was presumably that far behind. With
the instinct of a child Amory edged in under the blue darkness of
the white buildings, cleaving the moonlight for haggard seconds,
once bursting into a slow run with clumsy stumblings. After that
he stopped suddenly; he must keep hold, he thought. His lips were
dry and he licked them.
If he met any one good—were there any good people left in the
world or did they all live in white apartment-houses now? Was
every one followed in the moonlight? But if he met some one good
who’d know what he meant and hear this damned scuffle... then the
scuffling grew suddenly nearer, and a black cloud settled over
the moon. When again the pale sheen skimmed the cornices, it was
almost beside him, and Amory thought he heard a quiet breathing.
Suddenly he realized that the footsteps were not behind, had
never been behind, they were ahead and he was not eluding but
following... following. He began to run, blindly, his heart
knocking heavily, his hands clinched. Far ahead a black dot
showed itself, resolved slowly into a human shape. But Amory was
beyond that now; he turned off the street and darted into an
alley, narrow and dark and smelling of old rottenness. He twisted
down a long, sinuous blackness, where the moonlight was shut away
except for tiny glints and patches... then suddenly sank panting
into a corner by a fence, exhausted. The steps ahead stopped, and
he could hear them shift slightly with a continuous motion, like
waves around a dock.
He put his face in his hands and covered eyes and ears as well as
he could. During all this time it never occurred to him that he
was delirious or drunk. He had a sense of reality such as
material things could never give him. His intellectual content
seemed to submit passively to it, and it fitted like a glove
everything that had ever preceded it in his life. It did not
muddle him. It was like a problem whose answer he knew on paper,
yet whose solution he was unable to grasp. He was far beyond
horror. He had sunk through the thin surface of that, now moved
in a region where the feet and the fear of white walls were real,
living things, things he must accept. Only far inside his soul a
little fire leaped and cried that something was pulling him down,
trying to get him inside a door and slam it behind him. After
that door was slammed there would be only footfalls and white
buildings in the moonlight, and perhaps he would be one of the
footfalls.
During the five or ten minutes he waited in the shadow of the
fence, there was somehow this fire... that was as near as he
could name it afterward. He remembered calling aloud:
“I want some one stupid. Oh, send some one stupid!” This to the
black fence opposite him, in whose shadows the footsteps shuffled
... shuffled. He supposed “stupid” and “good” had become somehow
intermingled through previous association. When he called thus it
was not an act of will at all—will had turned him away from the
moving figure in the street; it was almost instinct that called,
just the pile on pile of inherent tradition or some wild prayer
from way over the night. Then something clanged like a low gong
struck at a distance, and before his eyes a face flashed over the
two feet, a face pale and distorted with a sort of infinite evil
that twisted it like flame in the wind; _but he knew, for the
half instant that the gong tanged and hummed, that it was the
face of Dick Humbird._
Minutes later he sprang to his feet, realizing dimly that there
was no more sound, and that he was alone in the graying alley. It
was cold, and he started on a steady run for the light that
showed the street at the other end.
AT THE WINDOW
It was late morning when he woke and found the telephone beside
his bed in the hotel tolling frantically, and remembered that he
had left word to be called at eleven. Sloane was snoring heavily,
his clothes in a pile by his bed. They dressed and ate breakfast
in silence, and then sauntered out to get some air. Amory’s mind
was working slowly, trying to assimilate what had happened and
separate from the chaotic imagery that stacked his memory the
bare shreds of truth. If the morning had been cold and gray he
could have grasped the reins of the past in an instant, but it
was one of those days that New York gets sometimes in May, when
the air on Fifth Avenue is a soft, light wine. How much or how
little Sloane remembered Amory did not care to know; he
apparently had none of the nervous tension that was gripping
Amory and forcing his mind back and forth like a shrieking saw.
Then Broadway broke upon them, and with the babel of noise and
the painted faces a sudden sickness rushed over Amory.
“For God’s sake, let’s go back! Let’s get off of this—this
place!”
Sloane looked at him in amazement.
“What do you mean?”
“This street, it’s ghastly! Come on! let’s get back to the
Avenue!”
“Do you mean to say,” said Sloane stolidly, “that ’cause you had
some sort of indigestion that made you act like a maniac last
night, you’re never coming on Broadway again?”
Simultaneously Amory classed him with the crowd, and he seemed no