This Side of Paradise
failure.
AMORY: (Grimly) Go on.
ROSALIND: Oh—it _is_ Dawson Ryder. He’s so reliable, I almost
feel that he’d be a—a background.
AMORY: You don’t love him.
ROSALIND: I know, but I respect him, and he’s a good man and a
strong one.
AMORY: (Grudgingly) Yes—he’s that.
ROSALIND: Well—here’s one little thing. There was a little poor
boy we met in Rye Tuesday afternoon—and, oh, Dawson took him on
his lap and talked to him and promised him an Indian suit—and
next day he remembered and bought it—and, oh, it was so sweet and
I couldn’t help thinking he’d be so nice to—to our children—take
care of them—and I wouldn’t have to worry.
AMORY: (In despair) Rosalind! Rosalind!
ROSALIND: (With a faint roguishness) Don’t look so consciously
suffering.
AMORY: What power we have of hurting each other!
ROSALIND: (Commencing to sob again) It’s been so perfect—you and
I. So like a dream that I’d longed for and never thought I’d
find. The first real unselfishness I’ve ever felt in my life. And
I can’t see it fade out in a colorless atmosphere!
AMORY: It won’t—it won’t!
ROSALIND: I’d rather keep it as a beautiful memory—tucked away in
my heart.
AMORY: Yes, women can do that—but not men. I’d remember always,
not the beauty of it while it lasted, but just the bitterness,
the long bitterness.
ROSALIND: Don’t!
AMORY: All the years never to see you, never to kiss you, just a
gate shut and barred—you don’t dare be my wife.
ROSALIND: No—no—I’m taking the hardest course, the strongest
course. Marrying you would be a failure and I never fail—if you
don’t stop walking up and down I’ll scream!
(Again he sinks despairingly onto the lounge.)
AMORY: Come over here and kiss me.
ROSALIND: No.
AMORY: Don’t you _want_ to kiss me?
ROSALIND: To-night I want you to love me calmly and coolly.
AMORY: The beginning of the end.
ROSALIND: (With a burst of insight) Amory, you’re young. I’m
young. People excuse us now for our poses and vanities, for
treating people like Sancho and yet getting away with it. They
excuse us now. But you’ve got a lot of knocks coming to you—
AMORY: And you’re afraid to take them with me.
ROSALIND: No, not that. There was a poem I read somewhere—you’ll
say Ella Wheeler Wilcox and laugh—but listen:
“For this is wisdom—to love and live, To take what fate or the gods
may give, To ask no question, to make no prayer, To kiss the lips
and caress the hair, Speed passion’s ebb as we greet its flow, To
have and to hold, and, in time—let go.”
AMORY: But we haven’t had.
ROSALIND: Amory, I’m yours—you know it. There have been times in
the last month I’d have been completely yours if you’d said so.
But I can’t marry you and ruin both our lives.
AMORY: We’ve got to take our chance for happiness.
ROSALIND: Dawson says I’d learn to love him.
(AMORY with his head sunk in his hands does not move. The life
seems suddenly gone out of him.)
ROSALIND: Lover! Lover! I can’t do with you, and I can’t imagine
life without you.
AMORY: Rosalind, we’re on each other’s nerves. It’s just that
we’re both high-strung, and this week—
(His voice is curiously old. She crosses to him and taking his
face in her hands, kisses him.)
ROSALIND: I can’t, Amory. I can’t be shut away from the trees and
flowers, cooped up in a little flat, waiting for you. You’d hate
me in a narrow atmosphere. I’d make you hate me.
(Again she is blinded by sudden uncontrolled tears.)
AMORY: Rosalind—
ROSALIND: Oh, darling, go—Don’t make it harder! I can’t stand it—
AMORY: (His face drawn, his voice strained) Do you know what
you’re saying? Do you mean forever?
(There is a difference somehow in the quality of their
suffering.)
ROSALIND: Can’t you see—
AMORY: I’m afraid I can’t if you love me. You’re afraid of taking
two years’ knocks with me.
ROSALIND: I wouldn’t be the Rosalind you love.
AMORY: (A little hysterically) I can’t give you up! I can’t,
that’s all! I’ve got to have you!
ROSALIND: (A hard note in her voice) You’re being a baby now.
AMORY: (Wildly) I don’t care! You’re spoiling our lives!
ROSALIND: I’m doing the wise thing, the only thing.
AMORY: Are you going to marry Dawson Ryder?
ROSALIND: Oh, don’t ask me. You know I’m old in some ways—in
others—well, I’m just a little girl. I like sunshine and pretty
things and cheerfulness—and I dread responsibility. I don’t want
to think about pots and kitchens and brooms. I want to worry
whether my legs will get slick and brown when I swim in the
summer.
AMORY: And you love me.
ROSALIND: That’s just why it has to end. Drifting hurts too much.
We can’t have any more scenes like this.
(She draws his ring from her finger and hands it to him. Their
eyes blind again with tears.)
AMORY: (His lips against her wet cheek) Don’t! Keep it,
please—oh, don’t break my heart!
(She presses the ring softly into his hand.)
ROSALIND: (Brokenly) You’d better go.
AMORY: Good-by—
(She looks at him once more, with infinite longing, infinite
sadness.)
ROSALIND: Don’t ever forget me, Amory—
AMORY: Good-by—
(He goes to the door, fumbles for the knob, finds it—she sees him
throw back his head—and he is gone. Gone—she half starts from the
lounge and then sinks forward on her face into the pillows.)
ROSALIND: Oh, God, I want to die! (After a moment she rises and
with her eyes closed feels her way to the door. Then she turns
and looks once more at the room. Here they had sat and dreamed:
that tray she had so often filled with matches for him; that
shade that they had discreetly lowered one long Sunday afternoon.
Misty-eyed she stands and remembers; she speaks aloud.) Oh,
Amory, what have I done to you?
(And deep under the aching sadness that will pass in time,
Rosalind feels that she has lost something, she knows not what,
she knows not why.)
CHAPTER 2. Experiments in Convalescence
The Knickerbocker Bar, beamed upon by Maxfield Parrish’s jovial,
colorful “Old King Cole,” was well crowded. Amory stopped in the
entrance and looked at his wrist-watch; he wanted particularly to
know the time, for something in his mind that catalogued and
classified liked to chip things off cleanly. Later it would
satisfy him in a vague way to be able to think “that thing ended
at exactly twenty minutes after eight on Thursday, June 10,
1919.” This was allowing for the walk from her house—a walk
concerning which he had afterward not the faintest recollection.
He was in rather grotesque condition: two days of worry and
nervousness, of sleepless nights, of untouched meals, culminating
in the emotional crisis and Rosalind’s abrupt decision—the strain
of it had drugged the foreground of his mind into a merciful
coma. As he fumbled clumsily with the olives at the free-lunch
table, a man approached and spoke to him, and the olives dropped
from his nervous hands.
“Well, Amory...”
It was some one he had known at Princeton; he had no idea of the
name.
“Hello, old boy—” he heard himself saying.
“Name’s Jim Wilson—you’ve forgotten.”
“Sure, you bet, Jim. I remember.”
“Going to reunion?”
“You know!” Simultaneously he realized that he was not going to
reunion.
“Get overseas?”
Amory nodded, his eyes staring oddly. Stepping back to let some
one pass, he knocked the dish of olives to a crash on the floor.
“Too bad,” he muttered. “Have a drink?”
Wilson, ponderously diplomatic, reached over and slapped him on
the back.
“You’ve had plenty, old boy.”
Amory eyed him dumbly until Wilson grew embarrassed under the
scrutiny.
“Plenty, hell!” said Amory finally. “I haven’t had a drink
to-day.”
Wilson looked incredulous.
“Have a drink or not?” cried Amory rudely.
Together they sought the bar.
“Rye high.”
“I’ll just take a Bronx.”
Wilson had another; Amory had several more. They decided to sit
down. At ten o’clock Wilson was displaced by Carling, class of
’15. Amory, his head spinning gorgeously, layer upon layer of
soft satisfaction setting over the bruised spots of his spirit,
was discoursing volubly on the war.
“’S a mental was’e,” he insisted with owl-like wisdom. “Two years
my life spent inalleshual vacuity. Los’ idealism, got be physcal
anmal,” he shook his fist expressively at Old King Cole, “got be
Prussian ’bout ev’thing, women ’specially. Use’ be straight ’bout
women college. Now don’givadam.” He expressed his lack of
principle by sweeping a seltzer bottle with a broad gesture to
noisy extinction on the floor, but this did not interrupt his
speech. “Seek pleasure where find it for to-morrow die. ’At’s
philos’phy for me now on.”
Carling yawned, but Amory, waxing brilliant, continued:
“Use’ wonder ’bout things—people satisfied compromise,
fif’y-fif’y att’tude on life. Now don’ wonder, don’ wonder—” He
became so emphatic in impressing on Carling the fact that he
didn’t wonder that he lost the thread of his discourse and
concluded by announcing to the bar at large that he was a
“physcal anmal.”
“What are you celebrating, Amory?”
Amory leaned forward confidentially.
“Cel’brating blowmylife. Great moment blow my life. Can’t tell
you ’bout it—”
He heard Carling addressing a remark to the bartender:
“Give him a bromo-seltzer.”
Amory shook his head indignantly.
“None that stuff!”
“But listen, Amory, you’re making yourself sick. You’re white as
a ghost.”
Amory considered the question. He tried to look at himself in the
mirror but even by squinting up one eye could only see as far as
the row of bottles behind the bar.
“Like som’n solid. We go get some—some salad.”
He settled his coat with an attempt at nonchalance, but letting
go of the bar was too much for him, and he slumped against a
chair.
“We’ll go over to Shanley’s,” suggested Carling, offering an
elbow.
With this assistance Amory managed to get his legs in motion
enough to propel him across Forty-second Street.
Shanley’s was very dim. He was conscious that he was talking in a
loud voice, very succinctly and convincingly, he thought, about a
desire to crush people under his heel. He consumed three club
sandwiches, devouring each as though it were no larger than a
chocolate-drop. Then Rosalind began popping into his mind again,
and he found his lips forming her name over and over. Next he was
sleepy, and he had a hazy, listless sense of people in dress
suits, probably waiters, gathering around the table....
... He was in a room and Carling was saying something about a
knot in his shoe-lace.
“Nemmine,” he managed to articulate drowsily. “Sleep in ’em....”