This Side of Paradise
STILL ALCOHOLIC
He awoke laughing and his eyes lazily roamed his surroundings,
evidently a bedroom and bath in a good hotel. His head was
whirring and picture after picture was forming and blurring and
melting before his eyes, but beyond the desire to laugh he had no
entirely conscious reaction. He reached for the ’phone beside his
bed.
“Hello—what hotel is this—?
“Knickerbocker? All right, send up two rye high-balls—”
He lay for a moment and wondered idly whether they’d send up a
bottle or just two of those little glass containers. Then, with
an effort, he struggled out of bed and ambled into the bathroom.
When he emerged, rubbing himself lazily with a towel, he found
the bar boy with the drinks and had a sudden desire to kid him.
On reflection he decided that this would be undignified, so he
waved him away.
As the new alcohol tumbled into his stomach and warmed him, the
isolated pictures began slowly to form a cinema reel of the day
before. Again he saw Rosalind curled weeping among the pillows,
again he felt her tears against his cheek. Her words began
ringing in his ears: “Don’t ever forget me, Amory—don’t ever
forget me—”
“Hell!” he faltered aloud, and then he choked and collapsed on
the bed in a shaken spasm of grief. After a minute he opened his
eyes and regarded the ceiling.
“Damned fool!” he exclaimed in disgust, and with a voluminous
sigh rose and approached the bottle. After another glass he gave
way loosely to the luxury of tears. Purposely he called up into
his mind little incidents of the vanished spring, phrased to
himself emotions that would make him react even more strongly to
sorrow.
“We were so happy,” he intoned dramatically, “so very happy.”
Then he gave way again and knelt beside the bed, his head
half-buried in the pillow.
“My own girl—my own—Oh—”
He clinched his teeth so that the tears streamed in a flood from
his eyes.
“Oh... my baby girl, all I had, all I wanted!... Oh, my girl,
come back, come back! I need you... need you... we’re so pitiful
... just misery we brought each other.... She’ll be shut away
from me.... I can’t see her; I can’t be her friend. It’s got to
be that way—it’s got to be—”
And then again:
“We’ve been so happy, so very happy....”
He rose to his feet and threw himself on the bed in an ecstasy of
sentiment, and then lay exhausted while he realized slowly that
he had been very drunk the night before, and that his head was
spinning again wildly. He laughed, rose, and crossed again to
Lethe....
At noon he ran into a crowd in the Biltmore bar, and the riot
began again. He had a vague recollection afterward of discussing
French poetry with a British officer who was introduced to him as
“Captain Corn, of his Majesty’s Foot,” and he remembered
attempting to recite “Clair de Lune” at luncheon; then he slept
in a big, soft chair until almost five o’clock when another crowd
found and woke him; there followed an alcoholic dressing of
several temperaments for the ordeal of dinner. They selected
theatre tickets at Tyson’s for a play that had a four-drink
programme—a play with two monotonous voices, with turbid, gloomy
scenes, and lighting effects that were hard to follow when his
eyes behaved so amazingly. He imagined afterward that it must
have been “The Jest.”...
... Then the Cocoanut Grove, where Amory slept again on a little
balcony outside. Out in Shanley’s, Yonkers, he became almost
logical, and by a careful control of the number of high-balls he
drank, grew quite lucid and garrulous. He found that the party
consisted of five men, two of whom he knew slightly; he became
righteous about paying his share of the expense and insisted in a
loud voice on arranging everything then and there to the
amusement of the tables around him....
Some one mentioned that a famous cabaret star was at the next
table, so Amory rose and, approaching gallantly, introduced
himself... this involved him in an argument, first with her
escort and then with the headwaiter—Amory’s attitude being a
lofty and exaggerated courtesy... he consented, after being
confronted with irrefutable logic, to being led back to his own
table.
“Decided to commit suicide,” he announced suddenly.
“When? Next year?”
“Now. To-morrow morning. Going to take a room at the Commodore,
get into a hot bath and open a vein.”
“He’s getting morbid!”
“You need another rye, old boy!”
“We’ll all talk it over to-morrow.”
But Amory was not to be dissuaded, from argument at least.
“Did you ever get that way?” he demanded confidentially
fortaccio.
“Sure!”
“Often?”
“My chronic state.”
This provoked discussion. One man said that he got so depressed
sometimes that he seriously considered it. Another agreed that
there was nothing to live for. “Captain Corn,” who had somehow
rejoined the party, said that in his opinion it was when one’s
health was bad that one felt that way most. Amory’s suggestion
was that they should each order a Bronx, mix broken glass in it,
and drink it off. To his relief no one applauded the idea, so
having finished his high-ball, he balanced his chin in his hand
and his elbow on the table—a most delicate, scarcely noticeable
sleeping position, he assured himself—and went into a deep
stupor....
He was awakened by a woman clinging to him, a pretty woman, with
brown, disarranged hair and dark blue eyes.
“Take me home!” she cried.
“Hello!” said Amory, blinking.
“I like you,” she announced tenderly.
“I like you too.”
He noticed that there was a noisy man in the background and that
one of his party was arguing with him.
“Fella I was with’s a damn fool,” confided the blue-eyed woman.
“I hate him. I want to go home with you.”
“You drunk?” queried Amory with intense wisdom.
She nodded coyly.
“Go home with him,” he advised gravely. “He brought you.”
At this point the noisy man in the background broke away from his
detainers and approached.
“Say!” he said fiercely. “I brought this girl out here and you’re
butting in!”
Amory regarded him coldly, while the girl clung to him closer.
“You let go that girl!” cried the noisy man.
Amory tried to make his eyes threatening.
“You go to hell!” he directed finally, and turned his attention
to the girl.
“Love first sight,” he suggested.
“I love you,” she breathed and nestled close to him. She _did_
have beautiful eyes.
Some one leaned over and spoke in Amory’s ear.
“That’s just Margaret Diamond. She’s drunk and this fellow here
brought her. Better let her go.”
“Let him take care of her, then!” shouted Amory furiously. “I’m
no W. Y. C. A. worker, am I?—am I?”
“Let her go!”
“It’s _her_ hanging on, damn it! Let her hang!”
The crowd around the table thickened. For an instant a brawl
threatened, but a sleek waiter bent back Margaret Diamond’s
fingers until she released her hold on Amory, whereupon she
slapped the waiter furiously in the face and flung her arms about
her raging original escort.
“Oh, Lord!” cried Amory.
“Let’s go!”
“Come on, the taxis are getting scarce!”
“Check, waiter.”
“C’mon, Amory. Your romance is over.”
Amory laughed.
“You don’t know how true you spoke. No idea. ’At’s the whole
trouble.”
AMORY ON THE LABOR QUESTION
Two mornings later he knocked at the president’s door at Bascome
and Barlow’s advertising agency.
“Come in!”
Amory entered unsteadily.
“’Morning, Mr. Barlow.”
Mr. Barlow brought his glasses to the inspection and set his
mouth slightly ajar that he might better listen.
“Well, Mr. Blaine. We haven’t seen you for several days.”
“No,” said Amory. “I’m quitting.”
“Well—well—this is—”
“I don’t like it here.”
“I’m sorry. I thought our relations had been quite—ah—pleasant.
You seemed to be a hard worker—a little inclined perhaps to write
fancy copy—”
“I just got tired of it,” interrupted Amory rudely. “It didn’t
matter a damn to me whether Harebell’s flour was any better than
any one else’s. In fact, I never ate any of it. So I got tired of
telling people about it—oh, I know I’ve been drinking—”
Mr. Barlow’s face steeled by several ingots of expression.
“You asked for a position—”
Amory waved him to silence.
“And I think I was rottenly underpaid. Thirty-five dollars a
week—less than a good carpenter.”
“You had just started. You’d never worked before,” said Mr.
Barlow coolly.
“But it took about ten thousand dollars to educate me where I
could write your darned stuff for you. Anyway, as far as length
of service goes, you’ve got stenographers here you’ve paid
fifteen a week for five years.”
“I’m not going to argue with you, sir,” said Mr. Barlow rising.
“Neither am I. I just wanted to tell you I’m quitting.”
They stood for a moment looking at each other impassively and
then Amory turned and left the office.
A LITTLE LULL
Four days after that he returned at last to the apartment. Tom
was engaged on a book review for The New Democracy on the staff
of which he was employed. They regarded each other for a moment
in silence.
“Well?”
“Well?”
“Good Lord, Amory, where’d you get the black eye—and the jaw?”
Amory laughed.
“That’s a mere nothing.”
He peeled off his coat and bared his shoulders.
“Look here!”
Tom emitted a low whistle.
“What hit you?”
Amory laughed again.
“Oh, a lot of people. I got beaten up. Fact.” He slowly replaced
his shirt. “It was bound to come sooner or later and I wouldn’t
have missed it for anything.”
“Who was it?”
“Well, there were some waiters and a couple of sailors and a few
stray pedestrians, I guess. It’s the strangest feeling. You ought
to get beaten up just for the experience of it. You fall down
after a while and everybody sort of slashes in at you before you
hit the ground—then they kick you.”
Tom lighted a cigarette.
“I spent a day chasing you all over town, Amory. But you always
kept a little ahead of me. I’d say you’ve been on some party.”
Amory tumbled into a chair and asked for a cigarette.
“You sober now?” asked Tom quizzically.
“Pretty sober. Why?”
“Well, Alec has left. His family had been after him to go home
and live, so he—”
A spasm of pain shook Amory.
“Too bad.”
“Yes, it is too bad. We’ll have to get some one else if we’re
going to stay here. The rent’s going up.”
“Sure. Get anybody. I’ll leave it to you, Tom.”
Amory walked into his bedroom. The first thing that met his
glance was a photograph of Rosalind that he had intended to have