This Side of Paradise
half-remembered dreams, sweet and new on your mouth.
... There was a tanging in the midnight air—silence was dead and sound
not yet awoken—Life cracked like ice!—one brilliant note and there,
radiant and pale, you stood... and spring had broken. (The icicles
were short upon the roofs and the changeling city swooned.)
Our thoughts were frosty mist along the eaves; our two ghosts kissed,
high on the long, mazed wires—eerie half-laughter echoes here and
leaves only a fatuous sigh for young desires; regret has followed
after things she loved, leaving the great husk.
ANOTHER ENDING
In mid-August came a letter from Monsignor Darcy, who had
evidently just stumbled on his address:
MY DEAR BOY:—
Your last letter was quite enough to make me worry about you. It
was not a bit like yourself. Reading between the lines I should
imagine that your engagement to this girl is making you rather
unhappy, and I see you have lost all the feeling of romance that
you had before the war. You make a great mistake if you think you
can be romantic without religion. Sometimes I think that with
both of us the secret of success, when we find it, is the
mystical element in us: something flows into us that enlarges our
personalities, and when it ebbs out our personalities shrink; I
should call your last two letters rather shrivelled. Beware of
losing yourself in the personality of another being, man or
woman.
His Eminence Cardinal O’Neill and the Bishop of Boston are
staying with me at present, so it is hard for me to get a moment
to write, but I wish you would come up here later if only for a
week-end. I go to Washington this week.
What I shall do in the future is hanging in the balance.
Absolutely between ourselves I should not be surprised to see the
red hat of a cardinal descend upon my unworthy head within the
next eight months. In any event, I should like to have a house in
New York or Washington where you could drop in for week-ends.
Amory, I’m very glad we’re both alive; this war could easily have
been the end of a brilliant family. But in regard to matrimony,
you are now at the most dangerous period of your life. You might
marry in haste and repent at leisure, but I think you won’t. From
what you write me about the present calamitous state of your
finances, what you want is naturally impossible. However, if I
judge you by the means I usually choose, I should say that there
will be something of an emotional crisis within the next year.
Do write me. I feel annoyingly out of date on you.
With greatest affection,
THAYER DARCY.
Within a week after the receipt of this letter their little
household fell precipitously to pieces. The immediate cause was
the serious and probably chronic illness of Tom’s mother. So they
stored the furniture, gave instructions to sublet and shook hands
gloomily in the Pennsylvania Station. Amory and Tom seemed always
to be saying good-by.
Feeling very much alone, Amory yielded to an impulse and set off
southward, intending to join Monsignor in Washington. They missed
connections by two hours, and, deciding to spend a few days with
an ancient, remembered uncle, Amory journeyed up through the
luxuriant fields of Maryland into Ramilly County. But instead of
two days his stay lasted from mid-August nearly through
September, for in Maryland he met Eleanor.
CHAPTER 3. Young Irony
For years afterward when Amory thought of Eleanor he seemed still
to hear the wind sobbing around him and sending little chills
into the places beside his heart. The night when they rode up the
slope and watched the cold moon float through the clouds, he lost
a further part of him that nothing could restore; and when he
lost it he lost also the power of regretting it. Eleanor was,
say, the last time that evil crept close to Amory under the mask
of beauty, the last weird mystery that held him with wild
fascination and pounded his soul to flakes.
With her his imagination ran riot and that is why they rode to
the highest hill and watched an evil moon ride high, for they
knew then that they could see the devil in each other. But
Eleanor—did Amory dream her? Afterward their ghosts played, yet
both of them hoped from their souls never to meet. Was it the
infinite sadness of her eyes that drew him or the mirror of
himself that he found in the gorgeous clarity of her mind? She
will have no other adventure like Amory, and if she reads this
she will say:
“And Amory will have no other adventure like me.”
Nor will she sigh, any more than he would sigh.
Eleanor tried to put it on paper once:
“The fading things we only know We’ll have forgotten... Put away...
Desires that melted with the snow, And dreams begotten This to-day:
The sudden dawns we laughed to greet, That all could see, that none
could share, Will be but dawns... and if we meet We shall not care.
Dear... not one tear will rise for this... A little while hence No
regret Will stir for a remembered kiss— Not even silence, When
we’ve met, Will give old ghosts a waste to roam, Or stir the
surface of the sea... If gray shapes drift beneath the foam We
shall not see.”
They quarrelled dangerously because Amory maintained that _sea_
and _see_ couldn’t possibly be used as a rhyme. And then Eleanor
had part of another verse that she couldn’t find a beginning for:
“... But wisdom passes... still the years Will feed us wisdom....
Age will go Back to the old— For all our tears We shall not know.”
Eleanor hated Maryland passionately. She belonged to the oldest
of the old families of Ramilly County and lived in a big, gloomy
house with her grandfather. She had been born and brought up in
France.... I see I am starting wrong. Let me begin again.
Amory was bored, as he usually was in the country. He used to go
for far walks by himself—and wander along reciting “Ulalume” to
the corn-fields, and congratulating Poe for drinking himself to
death in that atmosphere of smiling complacency. One afternoon he
had strolled for several miles along a road that was new to him,
and then through a wood on bad advice from a colored woman...
losing himself entirely. A passing storm decided to break out,
and to his great impatience the sky grew black as pitch and the
rain began to splatter down through the trees, become suddenly
furtive and ghostly. Thunder rolled with menacing crashes up the
valley and scattered through the woods in intermittent batteries.
He stumbled blindly on, hunting for a way out, and finally,
through webs of twisted branches, caught sight of a rift in the
trees where the unbroken lightning showed open country. He rushed
to the edge of the woods and then hesitated whether or not to
cross the fields and try to reach the shelter of the little house
marked by a light far down the valley. It was only half past
five, but he could see scarcely ten steps before him, except when
the lightning made everything vivid and grotesque for great
sweeps around.
Suddenly a strange sound fell on his ears. It was a song, in a
low, husky voice, a girl’s voice, and whoever was singing was
very close to him. A year before he might have laughed, or
trembled; but in his restless mood he only stood and listened
while the words sank into his consciousness:
“Les sanglots longs Des violons De l’automne Blessent mon coeur
D’une langueur Monotone.”
The lightning split the sky, but the song went on without a
quaver. The girl was evidently in the field and the voice seemed
to come vaguely from a haystack about twenty feet in front of
him.
Then it ceased: ceased and began again in a weird chant that
soared and hung and fell and blended with the rain:
“Tout suffocant Et bleme quand Sonne l’heure Je me souviens Des
jours anciens Et je pleure....”
“Who the devil is there in Ramilly County,” muttered Amory aloud,
“who would deliver Verlaine in an extemporaneous tune to a
soaking haystack?”
“Somebody’s there!” cried the voice unalarmed. “Who are
you?—Manfred, St. Christopher, or Queen Victoria?”
“I’m Don Juan!” Amory shouted on impulse, raising his voice above
the noise of the rain and the wind.
A delighted shriek came from the haystack.
“I know who you are—you’re the blond boy that likes ‘Ulalume’—I
recognize your voice.”
“How do I get up?” he cried from the foot of the haystack,
whither he had arrived, dripping wet. A head appeared over the
edge—it was so dark that Amory could just make out a patch of
damp hair and two eyes that gleamed like a cat’s.
“Run back!” came the voice, “and jump and I’ll catch your
hand—no, not there—on the other side.”
He followed directions and as he sprawled up the side, knee-deep
in hay, a small, white hand reached out, gripped his, and helped
him onto the top.
“Here you are, Juan,” cried she of the damp hair. “Do you mind if
I drop the Don?”
“You’ve got a thumb like mine!” he exclaimed.
“And you’re holding my hand, which is dangerous without seeing my
face.” He dropped it quickly.
As if in answer to his prayers came a flash of lightning and he
looked eagerly at her who stood beside him on the soggy haystack,
ten feet above the ground. But she had covered her face and he
saw nothing but a slender figure, dark, damp, bobbed hair, and
the small white hands with the thumbs that bent back like his.
“Sit down,” she suggested politely, as the dark closed in on
them. “If you’ll sit opposite me in this hollow you can have half
of the raincoat, which I was using as a water-proof tent until
you so rudely interrupted me.”
“I was asked,” Amory said joyfully; “you asked me—you know you
did.”
“Don Juan always manages that,” she said, laughing, “but I shan’t
call you that any more, because you’ve got reddish hair. Instead
you can recite ‘Ulalume’ and I’ll be Psyche, your soul.”
Amory flushed, happily invisible under the curtain of wind and
rain. They were sitting opposite each other in a slight hollow in
the hay with the raincoat spread over most of them, and the rain
doing for the rest. Amory was trying desperately to see Psyche,
but the lightning refused to flash again, and he waited
impatiently. Good Lord! supposing she wasn’t beautiful—supposing
she was forty and pedantic—heavens! Suppose, only suppose, she
was mad. But he knew the last was unworthy. Here had Providence
sent a girl to amuse him just as it sent Benvenuto Cellini men to
murder, and he was wondering if she was mad, just because she
exactly filled his mood.
“I’m not,” she said.
“Not what?”
“Not mad. I didn’t think you were mad when I first saw you, so it
isn’t fair that you should think so of me.”
“How on earth—”
As long as they knew each other Eleanor and Amory could be “on a
subject” and stop talking with the definite thought of it in