This Side of Paradise
their heads, yet ten minutes later speak aloud and find that
their minds had followed the same channels and led them each to a
parallel idea, an idea that others would have found absolutely
unconnected with the first.
“Tell me,” he demanded, leaning forward eagerly, “how do you know
about ‘Ulalume’—how did you know the color of my hair? What’s
your name? What were you doing here? Tell me all at once!”
Suddenly the lightning flashed in with a leap of overreaching
light and he saw Eleanor, and looked for the first time into
those eyes of hers. Oh, she was magnificent—pale skin, the color
of marble in starlight, slender brows, and eyes that glittered
green as emeralds in the blinding glare. She was a witch, of
perhaps nineteen, he judged, alert and dreamy and with the
tell-tale white line over her upper lip that was a weakness and a
delight. He sank back with a gasp against the wall of hay.
“Now you’ve seen me,” she said calmly, “and I suppose you’re
about to say that my green eyes are burning into your brain.”
“What color is your hair?” he asked intently. “It’s bobbed, isn’t
it?”
“Yes, it’s bobbed. I don’t know what color it is,” she answered,
musing, “so many men have asked me. It’s medium, I suppose—No one
ever looks long at my hair. I’ve got beautiful eyes, though,
haven’t I. I don’t care what you say, I have beautiful eyes.”
“Answer my question, Madeline.”
“Don’t remember them all—besides my name isn’t Madeline, it’s
Eleanor.”
“I might have guessed it. You _look_ like Eleanor—you have that
Eleanor look. You know what I mean.”
There was a silence as they listened to the rain.
“It’s going down my neck, fellow lunatic,” she offered finally.
“Answer my questions.”
“Well—name of Savage, Eleanor; live in big old house mile down
road; nearest living relation to be notified, grandfather—Ramilly
Savage; height, five feet four inches; number on watch-case, 3077
W; nose, delicate aquiline; temperament, uncanny—”
“And me,” Amory interrupted, “where did you see me?”
“Oh, you’re one of _those_ men,” she answered haughtily, “must
lug old self into conversation. Well, my boy, I was behind a
hedge sunning myself one day last week, and along comes a man
saying in a pleasant, conceited way of talking:
“‘And now when the night was senescent’ (says he) ‘And the star
dials pointed to morn At the end of the path a liquescent’ (says
he) ‘And nebulous lustre was born.’
“So I poked my eyes up over the hedge, but you had started to
run, for some unknown reason, and so I saw but the back of your
beautiful head. ‘Oh!’ says I, ‘there’s a man for whom many of us
might sigh,’ and I continued in my best Irish—”
“All right,” Amory interrupted. “Now go back to yourself.”
“Well, I will. I’m one of those people who go through the world
giving other people thrills, but getting few myself except those
I read into men on such nights as these. I have the social
courage to go on the stage, but not the energy; I haven’t the
patience to write books; and I never met a man I’d marry.
However, I’m only eighteen.”
The storm was dying down softly and only the wind kept up its
ghostly surge and made the stack lean and gravely settle from
side to side. Amory was in a trance. He felt that every moment
was precious. He had never met a girl like this before—she would
never seem quite the same again. He didn’t at all feel like a
character in a play, the appropriate feeling in an unconventional
situation—instead, he had a sense of coming home.
“I have just made a great decision,” said Eleanor after another
pause, “and that is why I’m here, to answer another of your
questions. I have just decided that I don’t believe in
immortality.”
“Really! how banal!”
“Frightfully so,” she answered, “but depressing with a stale,
sickly depression, nevertheless. I came out here to get wet—like
a wet hen; wet hens always have great clarity of mind,” she
concluded.
“Go on,” Amory said politely.
“Well—I’m not afraid of the dark, so I put on my slicker and
rubber boots and came out. You see I was always afraid, before,
to say I didn’t believe in God—because the lightning might strike
me—but here I am and it hasn’t, of course, but the main point is
that this time I wasn’t any more afraid of it than I had been
when I was a Christian Scientist, like I was last year. So now I
know I’m a materialist and I was fraternizing with the hay when
you came out and stood by the woods, scared to death.”
“Why, you little wretch—” cried Amory indignantly. “Scared of
what?”
“_Yourself!_” she shouted, and he jumped. She clapped her hands
and laughed. “See—see! Conscience—kill it like me! Eleanor
Savage, materiologist—no jumping, no starting, come early—”
“But I _have_ to have a soul,” he objected. “I can’t be
rational—and I won’t be molecular.”
She leaned toward him, her burning eyes never leaving his own and
whispered with a sort of romantic finality:
“I thought so, Juan, I feared so—you’re sentimental. You’re not
like me. I’m a romantic little materialist.”
“I’m not sentimental—I’m as romantic as you are. The idea, you
know, is that the sentimental person thinks things will last—the
romantic person has a desperate confidence that they won’t.”
(This was an ancient distinction of Amory’s.)
“Epigrams. I’m going home,” she said sadly. “Let’s get off the
haystack and walk to the cross-roads.”
They slowly descended from their perch. She would not let him
help her down and motioning him away arrived in a graceful lump
in the soft mud where she sat for an instant, laughing at
herself. Then she jumped to her feet and slipped her hand into
his, and they tiptoed across the fields, jumping and swinging
from dry spot to dry spot. A transcendent delight seemed to
sparkle in every pool of water, for the moon had risen and the
storm had scurried away into western Maryland. When Eleanor’s arm
touched his he felt his hands grow cold with deadly fear lest he
should lose the shadow brush with which his imagination was
painting wonders of her. He watched her from the corners of his
eyes as ever he did when he walked with her—she was a feast and a
folly and he wished it had been his destiny to sit forever on a
haystack and see life through her green eyes. His paganism soared
that night and when she faded out like a gray ghost down the
road, a deep singing came out of the fields and filled his way
homeward. All night the summer moths flitted in and out of
Amory’s window; all night large looming sounds swayed in mystic
revery through the silver grain—and he lay awake in the clear
darkness.
SEPTEMBER
Amory selected a blade of grass and nibbled at it scientifically.
“I never fall in love in August or September,” he proffered.
“When then?”
“Christmas or Easter. I’m a liturgist.”
“Easter!” She turned up her nose. “Huh! Spring in corsets!”
“Easter _would_ bore spring, wouldn’t she? Easter has her hair
braided, wears a tailored suit.”
“Bind on thy sandals, oh, thou most fleet. Over the splendor and
speed of thy feet—”
quoted Eleanor softly, and then added: “I suppose Hallowe’en is a
better day for autumn than Thanksgiving.”
“Much better—and Christmas eve does very well for winter, but
summer...”
“Summer has no day,” she said. “We can’t possibly have a summer
love. So many people have tried that the name’s become
proverbial. Summer is only the unfulfilled promise of spring, a
charlatan in place of the warm balmy nights I dream of in April.
It’s a sad season of life without growth.... It has no day.”
“Fourth of July,” Amory suggested facetiously.
“Don’t be funny!” she said, raking him with her eyes.
“Well, what could fulfil the promise of spring?”
She thought a moment.
“Oh, I suppose heaven would, if there was one,” she said finally,
“a sort of pagan heaven—you ought to be a materialist,” she
continued irrelevantly.
“Why?”
“Because you look a good deal like the pictures of Rupert
Brooke.”
To some extent Amory tried to play Rupert Brooke as long as he
knew Eleanor. What he said, his attitude toward life, toward her,
toward himself, were all reflexes of the dead Englishman’s
literary moods. Often she sat in the grass, a lazy wind playing
with her short hair, her voice husky as she ran up and down the
scale from Grantchester to Waikiki. There was something most
passionate in Eleanor’s reading aloud. They seemed nearer, not
only mentally, but physically, when they read, than when she was
in his arms, and this was often, for they fell half into love
almost from the first. Yet was Amory capable of love now? He
could, as always, run through the emotions in a half hour, but
even while they revelled in their imaginations, he knew that
neither of them could care as he had cared once before—I suppose
that was why they turned to Brooke, and Swinburne, and Shelley.
Their chance was to make everything fine and finished and rich
and imaginative; they must bend tiny golden tentacles from his
imagination to hers, that would take the place of the great, deep
love that was never so near, yet never so much of a dream.
One poem they read over and over; Swinburne’s “Triumph of Time,”
and four lines of it rang in his memory afterward on warm nights
when he saw the fireflies among dusky tree trunks and heard the
low drone of many frogs. Then Eleanor seemed to come out of the
night and stand by him, and he heard her throaty voice, with its
tone of a fleecy-headed drum, repeating:
“Is it worth a tear, is it worth an hour, To think of things that
are well outworn; Of fruitless husk and fugitive flower, The dream
foregone and the deed foreborne?”
They were formally introduced two days later, and his aunt told
him her history. The Ramillys were two: old Mr. Ramilly and his
granddaughter, Eleanor. She had lived in France with a restless
mother whom Amory imagined to have been very like his own, on
whose death she had come to America, to live in Maryland. She had
gone to Baltimore first to stay with a bachelor uncle, and there
she insisted on being a debutante at the age of seventeen. She
had a wild winter and arrived in the country in March, having
quarrelled frantically with all her Baltimore relatives, and
shocked them into fiery protest. A rather fast crowd had come
out, who drank cocktails in limousines and were promiscuously
condescending and patronizing toward older people, and Eleanor
with an esprit that hinted strongly of the boulevards, led many
innocents still redolent of St. Timothy’s and Farmington, into
paths of Bohemian naughtiness. When the story came to her uncle,
a forgetful cavalier of a more hypocritical era, there was a
scene, from which Eleanor emerged, subdued but rebellious and