This Side of Paradise
indignant, to seek haven with her grandfather who hovered in the
country on the near side of senility. That’s as far as her story
went; she told him the rest herself, but that was later.
Often they swam and as Amory floated lazily in the water he shut
his mind to all thoughts except those of hazy soap-bubble lands
where the sun splattered through wind-drunk trees. How could any
one possibly think or worry, or do anything except splash and
dive and loll there on the edge of time while the flower months
failed. Let the days move over—sadness and memory and pain
recurred outside, and here, once more, before he went on to meet
them he wanted to drift and be young.
There were days when Amory resented that life had changed from an
even progress along a road stretching ever in sight, with the
scenery merging and blending, into a succession of quick,
unrelated scenes—two years of sweat and blood, that sudden absurd
instinct for paternity that Rosalind had stirred; the
half-sensual, half-neurotic quality of this autumn with Eleanor.
He felt that it would take all time, more than he could ever
spare, to glue these strange cumbersome pictures into the
scrap-book of his life. It was all like a banquet where he sat
for this half-hour of his youth and tried to enjoy brilliant
epicurean courses.
Dimly he promised himself a time where all should be welded
together. For months it seemed that he had alternated between
being borne along a stream of love or fascination, or left in an
eddy, and in the eddies he had not desired to think, rather to be
picked up on a wave’s top and swept along again.
“The despairing, dying autumn and our love—how well they
harmonize!” said Eleanor sadly one day as they lay dripping by
the water.
“The Indian summer of our hearts—” he ceased.
“Tell me,” she said finally, “was she light or dark?”
“Light.”
“Was she more beautiful than I am?”
“I don’t know,” said Amory shortly.
One night they walked while the moon rose and poured a great
burden of glory over the garden until it seemed fairyland with
Amory and Eleanor, dim phantasmal shapes, expressing eternal
beauty in curious elfin love moods. Then they turned out of the
moonlight into the trellised darkness of a vine-hung pagoda,
where there were scents so plaintive as to be nearly musical.
“Light a match,” she whispered. “I want to see you.”
Scratch! Flare!
The night and the scarred trees were like scenery in a play, and
to be there with Eleanor, shadowy and unreal, seemed somehow
oddly familiar. Amory thought how it was only the past that ever
seemed strange and unbelievable. The match went out.
“It’s black as pitch.”
“We’re just voices now,” murmured Eleanor, “little lonesome
voices. Light another.”
“That was my last match.”
Suddenly he caught her in his arms.
“You _are_ mine—you know you’re mine!” he cried wildly... the
moonlight twisted in through the vines and listened... the
fireflies hung upon their whispers as if to win his glance from
the glory of their eyes.
THE END OF SUMMER
“No wind is stirring in the grass; not one wind stirs... the
water in the hidden pools, as glass, fronts the full moon and so
inters the golden token in its icy mass,” chanted Eleanor to the
trees that skeletoned the body of the night. “Isn’t it ghostly
here? If you can hold your horse’s feet up, let’s cut through the
woods and find the hidden pools.”
“It’s after one, and you’ll get the devil,” he objected, “and I
don’t know enough about horses to put one away in the pitch
dark.”
“Shut up, you old fool,” she whispered irrelevantly, and, leaning
over, she patted him lazily with her riding-crop. “You can leave
your old plug in our stable and I’ll send him over to-morrow.”
“But my uncle has got to drive me to the station with this old
plug at seven o’clock.”
“Don’t be a spoil-sport—remember, you have a tendency toward
wavering that prevents you from being the entire light of my
life.”
Amory drew his horse up close beside, and, leaning toward her,
grasped her hand.
“Say I am—_quick_, or I’ll pull you over and make you ride behind
me.”
She looked up and smiled and shook her head excitedly.
“Oh, do!—or rather, don’t! Why are all the exciting things so
uncomfortable, like fighting and exploring and ski-ing in Canada?
By the way, we’re going to ride up Harper’s Hill. I think that
comes in our programme about five o’clock.”
“You little devil,” Amory growled. “You’re going to make me stay
up all night and sleep in the train like an immigrant all day
to-morrow, going back to New York.”
“Hush! some one’s coming along the road—let’s go! Whoo-ee-oop!”
And with a shout that probably gave the belated traveller a
series of shivers, she turned her horse into the woods and Amory
followed slowly, as he had followed her all day for three weeks.
The summer was over, but he had spent the days in watching
Eleanor, a graceful, facile Manfred, build herself intellectual
and imaginative pyramids while she revelled in the
artificialities of the temperamental teens and they wrote poetry
at the dinner-table.
When Vanity kissed Vanity, a hundred happy Junes ago, he pondered
o’er her breathlessly, and, that all men might ever know, he rhymed
her eyes with life and death:
“Thru Time I’ll save my love!” he said... yet Beauty vanished with
his breath, and, with her lovers, she was dead...
—Ever his wit and not her eyes, ever his art and not her hair:
“Who’d learn a trick in rhyme, be wise and pause before his sonnet
there”... So all my words, however true, might sing you to a
thousandth June, and no one ever _know_ that you were Beauty for an
afternoon.
So he wrote one day, when he pondered how coldly we thought of
the “Dark Lady of the Sonnets,” and how little we remembered her
as the great man wanted her remembered. For what Shakespeare
_must_ have desired, to have been able to write with such divine
despair, was that the lady should live... and now we have no real
interest in her.... The irony of it is that if he had cared
_more_ for the poem than for the lady the sonnet would be only
obvious, imitative rhetoric and no one would ever have read it
after twenty years....
This was the last night Amory ever saw Eleanor. He was leaving in
the morning and they had agreed to take a long farewell trot by
the cold moonlight. She wanted to talk, she said—perhaps the last
time in her life that she could be rational (she meant pose with
comfort). So they had turned into the woods and rode for half an
hour with scarcely a word, except when she whispered “Damn!” at a
bothersome branch—whispered it as no other girl was ever able to
whisper it. Then they started up Harper’s Hill, walking their
tired horses.
“Good Lord! It’s quiet here!” whispered Eleanor; “much more
lonesome than the woods.”
“I hate woods,” Amory said, shuddering. “Any kind of foliage or
underbrush at night. Out here it’s so broad and easy on the
spirit.”
“The long slope of a long hill.”
“And the cold moon rolling moonlight down it.”
“And thee and me, last and most important.”
It was quiet that night—the straight road they followed up to the
edge of the cliff knew few footsteps at any time. Only an
occasional negro cabin, silver-gray in the rock-ribbed moonlight,
broke the long line of bare ground; behind lay the black edge of
the woods like a dark frosting on white cake, and ahead the
sharp, high horizon. It was much colder—so cold that it settled
on them and drove all the warm nights from their minds.
“The end of summer,” said Eleanor softly. “Listen to the beat of
our horses’ hoofs—‘tump-tump-tump-a-tump.’ Have you ever been
feverish and had all noises divide into ‘tump-tump-tump’ until
you could swear eternity was divisible into so many tumps? That’s
the way I feel—old horses go tump-tump.... I guess that’s the
only thing that separates horses and clocks from us. Human beings
can’t go ‘tump-tump-tump’ without going crazy.”
The breeze freshened and Eleanor pulled her cape around her and
shivered.
“Are you very cold?” asked Amory.
“No, I’m thinking about myself—my black old inside self, the real
one, with the fundamental honesty that keeps me from being
absolutely wicked by making me realize my own sins.”
They were riding up close by the cliff and Amory gazed over.
Where the fall met the ground a hundred feet below, a black
stream made a sharp line, broken by tiny glints in the swift
water.
“Rotten, rotten old world,” broke out Eleanor suddenly, “and the
wretchedest thing of all is me—oh, _why_ am I a girl? Why am I
not a stupid—? Look at you; you’re stupider than I am, not much,
but some, and you can lope about and get bored and then lope
somewhere else, and you can play around with girls without being
involved in meshes of sentiment, and you can do anything and be
justified—and here am I with the brains to do everything, yet
tied to the sinking ship of future matrimony. If I were born a
hundred years from now, well and good, but now what’s in store
for me—I have to marry, that goes without saying. Who? I’m too
bright for most men, and yet I have to descend to their level and
let them patronize my intellect in order to get their attention.
Every year that I don’t marry I’ve got less chance for a
first-class man. At the best I can have my choice from one or two
cities and, of course, I have to marry into a dinner-coat.
“Listen,” she leaned close again, “I like clever men and
good-looking men, and, of course, no one cares more for
personality than I do. Oh, just one person in fifty has any
glimmer of what sex is. I’m hipped on Freud and all that, but
it’s rotten that every bit of _real_ love in the world is
ninety-nine per cent passion and one little soupcon of jealousy.”
She finished as suddenly as she began.
“Of course, you’re right,” Amory agreed. “It’s a rather
unpleasant overpowering force that’s part of the machinery under
everything. It’s like an actor that lets you see his mechanics!
Wait a minute till I think this out....”
He paused and tried to get a metaphor. They had turned the cliff
and were riding along the road about fifty feet to the left.
“You see every one’s got to have some cloak to throw around it.
The mediocre intellects, Plato’s second class, use the remnants
of romantic chivalry diluted with Victorian sentiment—and we who
consider ourselves the intellectuals cover it up by pretending
that it’s another side of us, has nothing to do with our shining
brains; we pretend that the fact that we realize it is really
absolving us from being a prey to it. But the truth is that sex
is right in the middle of our purest abstractions, so close that
it obscures vision.... I can kiss you now and will. ...” He