This Side of Paradise
framed, propped up against a mirror on his dresser. He looked at
it unmoved. After the vivid mental pictures of her that were his
portion at present, the portrait was curiously unreal. He went
back into the study.
“Got a cardboard box?”
“No,” answered Tom, puzzled. “Why should I have? Oh, yes—there
may be one in Alec’s room.”
Eventually Amory found what he was looking for and, returning to
his dresser, opened a drawer full of letters, notes, part of a
chain, two little handkerchiefs, and some snap-shots. As he
transferred them carefully to the box his mind wandered to some
place in a book where the hero, after preserving for a year a
cake of his lost love’s soap, finally washed his hands with it.
He laughed and began to hum “After you’ve gone” ... ceased
abruptly...
The string broke twice, and then he managed to secure it, dropped
the package into the bottom of his trunk, and having slammed the
lid returned to the study.
“Going out?” Tom’s voice held an undertone of anxiety.
“Uh-huh.”
“Where?”
“Couldn’t say, old keed.”
“Let’s have dinner together.”
“Sorry. I told Sukey Brett I’d eat with him.”
“Oh.”
“By-by.”
Amory crossed the street and had a high-ball; then he walked to
Washington Square and found a top seat on a bus. He disembarked
at Forty-third Street and strolled to the Biltmore bar.
“Hi, Amory!”
“What’ll you have?”
“Yo-ho! Waiter!”
TEMPERATURE NORMAL
The advent of prohibition with the “thirsty-first” put a sudden
stop to the submerging of Amory’s sorrows, and when he awoke one
morning to find that the old bar-to-bar days were over, he had
neither remorse for the past three weeks nor regret that their
repetition was impossible. He had taken the most violent, if the
weakest, method to shield himself from the stabs of memory, and
while it was not a course he would have prescribed for others, he
found in the end that it had done its business: he was over the
first flush of pain.
Don’t misunderstand! Amory had loved Rosalind as he would never
love another living person. She had taken the first flush of his
youth and brought from his unplumbed depths tenderness that had
surprised him, gentleness and unselfishness that he had never
given to another creature. He had later love-affairs, but of a
different sort: in those he went back to that, perhaps, more
typical frame of mind, in which the girl became the mirror of a
mood in him. Rosalind had drawn out what was more than passionate
admiration; he had a deep, undying affection for Rosalind.
But there had been, near the end, so much dramatic tragedy,
culminating in the arabesque nightmare of his three weeks’ spree,
that he was emotionally worn out. The people and surroundings
that he remembered as being cool or delicately artificial, seemed
to promise him a refuge. He wrote a cynical story which featured
his father’s funeral and despatched it to a magazine, receiving
in return a check for sixty dollars and a request for more of the
same tone. This tickled his vanity, but inspired him to no
further effort.
He read enormously. He was puzzled and depressed by “A Portrait
of the Artist as a Young Man”; intensely interested by “Joan and
Peter” and “The Undying Fire,” and rather surprised by his
discovery through a critic named Mencken of several excellent
American novels: “Vandover and the Brute,” “The Damnation of
Theron Ware,” and “Jennie Gerhardt.” Mackenzie, Chesterton,
Galsworthy, Bennett, had sunk in his appreciation from sagacious,
life-saturated geniuses to merely diverting contemporaries.
Shaw’s aloof clarity and brilliant consistency and the gloriously
intoxicated efforts of H. G. Wells to fit the key of romantic
symmetry into the elusive lock of truth, alone won his rapt
attention.
He wanted to see Monsignor Darcy, to whom he had written when he
landed, but he had not heard from him; besides he knew that a
visit to Monsignor would entail the story of Rosalind, and the
thought of repeating it turned him cold with horror.
In his search for cool people he remembered Mrs. Lawrence, a very
intelligent, very dignified lady, a convert to the church, and a
great devotee of Monsignor’s.
He called her on the ’phone one day. Yes, she remembered him
perfectly; no, Monsignor wasn’t in town, was in Boston she
thought; he’d promised to come to dinner when he returned.
Couldn’t Amory take luncheon with her?
“I thought I’d better catch up, Mrs. Lawrence,” he said rather
ambiguously when he arrived.
“Monsignor was here just last week,” said Mrs. Lawrence
regretfully. “He was very anxious to see you, but he’d left your
address at home.”
“Did he think I’d plunged into Bolshevism?” asked Amory,
interested.
“Oh, he’s having a frightful time.”
“Why?”
“About the Irish Republic. He thinks it lacks dignity.”
“So?”
“He went to Boston when the Irish President arrived and he was
greatly distressed because the receiving committee, when they
rode in an automobile, _would_ put their arms around the
President.”
“I don’t blame him.”
“Well, what impressed you more than anything while you were in
the army? You look a great deal older.”
“That’s from another, more disastrous battle,” he answered,
smiling in spite of himself. “But the army—let me see—well, I
discovered that physical courage depends to a great extent on the
physical shape a man is in. I found that I was as brave as the
next man—it used to worry me before.”
“What else?”
“Well, the idea that men can stand anything if they get used to
it, and the fact that I got a high mark in the psychological
examination.”
Mrs. Lawrence laughed. Amory was finding it a great relief to be
in this cool house on Riverside Drive, away from more condensed
New York and the sense of people expelling great quantities of
breath into a little space. Mrs. Lawrence reminded him vaguely of
Beatrice, not in temperament, but in her perfect grace and
dignity. The house, its furnishings, the manner in which dinner
was served, were in immense contrast to what he had met in the
great places on Long Island, where the servants were so obtrusive
that they had positively to be bumped out of the way, or even in
the houses of more conservative “Union Club” families. He
wondered if this air of symmetrical restraint, this grace, which
he felt was continental, was distilled through Mrs. Lawrence’s
New England ancestry or acquired in long residence in Italy and
Spain.
Two glasses of sauterne at luncheon loosened his tongue, and he
talked, with what he felt was something of his old charm, of
religion and literature and the menacing phenomena of the social
order. Mrs. Lawrence was ostensibly pleased with him, and her
interest was especially in his mind; he wanted people to like his
mind again—after a while it might be such a nice place in which
to live.
“Monsignor Darcy still thinks that you’re his reincarnation, that
your faith will eventually clarify.”
“Perhaps,” he assented. “I’m rather pagan at present. It’s just
that religion doesn’t seem to have the slightest bearing on life
at my age.”
When he left her house he walked down Riverside Drive with a
feeling of satisfaction. It was amusing to discuss again such
subjects as this young poet, Stephen Vincent Benet, or the Irish
Republic. Between the rancid accusations of Edward Carson and
Justice Cohalan he had completely tired of the Irish question;
yet there had been a time when his own Celtic traits were pillars
of his personal philosophy.
There seemed suddenly to be much left in life, if only this
revival of old interests did not mean that he was backing away
from it again—backing away from life itself.
RESTLESSNESS
“I’m tres old and tres bored, Tom,” said Amory one day,
stretching himself at ease in the comfortable window-seat. He
always felt most natural in a recumbent position.
“You used to be entertaining before you started to write,” he
continued. “Now you save any idea that you think would do to
print.”
Existence had settled back to an ambitionless normality. They had
decided that with economy they could still afford the apartment,
which Tom, with the domesticity of an elderly cat, had grown fond
of. The old English hunting prints on the wall were Tom’s, and
the large tapestry by courtesy, a relic of decadent days in
college, and the great profusion of orphaned candlesticks and the
carved Louis XV chair in which no one could sit more than a
minute without acute spinal disorders—Tom claimed that this was
because one was sitting in the lap of Montespan’s wraith—at any
rate, it was Tom’s furniture that decided them to stay.
They went out very little: to an occasional play, or to dinner at
the Ritz or the Princeton Club. With prohibition the great
rendezvous had received their death wounds; no longer could one
wander to the Biltmore bar at twelve or five and find congenial
spirits, and both Tom and Amory had outgrown the passion for
dancing with mid-Western or New Jersey debbies at the
Club-de-Vingt (surnamed the “Club de Gink”) or the Plaza Rose
Room—besides even that required several cocktails “to come down
to the intellectual level of the women present,” as Amory had
once put it to a horrified matron.
Amory had lately received several alarming letters from Mr.
Barton—the Lake Geneva house was too large to be easily rented;
the best rent obtainable at present would serve this year to
little more than pay for the taxes and necessary improvements; in
fact, the lawyer suggested that the whole property was simply a
white elephant on Amory’s hands. Nevertheless, even though it
might not yield a cent for the next three years, Amory decided
with a vague sentimentality that for the present, at any rate, he
would not sell the house.
This particular day on which he announced his ennui to Tom had
been quite typical. He had risen at noon, lunched with Mrs.
Lawrence, and then ridden abstractedly homeward atop one of his
beloved buses.
“Why shouldn’t you be bored,” yawned Tom. “Isn’t that the
conventional frame of mind for the young man of your age and
condition?”
“Yes,” said Amory speculatively, “but I’m more than bored; I am
restless.”
“Love and war did for you.”
“Well,” Amory considered, “I’m not sure that the war itself had
any great effect on either you or me—but it certainly ruined the
old backgrounds, sort of killed individualism out of our
generation.”
Tom looked up in surprise.
“Yes it did,” insisted Amory. “I’m not sure it didn’t kill it out
of the whole world. Oh, Lord, what a pleasure it used to be to
dream I might be a really great dictator or writer or religious