This Side of Paradise
leaned toward her in his saddle, but she drew away.
“I can’t—I can’t kiss you now—I’m more sensitive.”
“You’re more stupid then,” he declared rather impatiently.
“Intellect is no protection from sex any more than convention
is...”
“What is?” she fired up. “The Catholic Church or the maxims of
Confucius?”
Amory looked up, rather taken aback.
“That’s your panacea, isn’t it?” she cried. “Oh, you’re just an
old hypocrite, too. Thousands of scowling priests keeping the
degenerate Italians and illiterate Irish repentant with
gabble-gabble about the sixth and ninth commandments. It’s just
all cloaks, sentiment and spiritual rouge and panaceas. I’ll tell
you there is no God, not even a definite abstract goodness; so
it’s all got to be worked out for the individual by the
individual here in high white foreheads like mine, and you’re too
much the prig to admit it.” She let go her reins and shook her
little fists at the stars.
“If there’s a God let him strike me—strike me!”
“Talking about God again after the manner of atheists,” Amory
said sharply. His materialism, always a thin cloak, was torn to
shreds by Eleanor’s blasphemy.... She knew it and it angered him
that she knew it.
“And like most intellectuals who don’t find faith convenient,” he
continued coldly, “like Napoleon and Oscar Wilde and the rest of
your type, you’ll yell loudly for a priest on your death-bed.”
Eleanor drew her horse up sharply and he reined in beside her.
“Will I?” she said in a queer voice that scared him. “Will I?
Watch! _I’m going over the cliff!_” And before he could interfere
she had turned and was riding breakneck for the end of the
plateau.
He wheeled and started after her, his body like ice, his nerves
in a vast clangor. There was no chance of stopping her. The moon
was under a cloud and her horse would step blindly over. Then
some ten feet from the edge of the cliff she gave a sudden shriek
and flung herself sideways—plunged from her horse and, rolling
over twice, landed in a pile of brush five feet from the edge.
The horse went over with a frantic whinny. In a minute he was by
Eleanor’s side and saw that her eyes were open.
“Eleanor!” he cried.
She did not answer, but her lips moved and her eyes filled with
sudden tears.
“Eleanor, are you hurt?”
“No; I don’t think so,” she said faintly, and then began weeping.
“My horse dead?”
“Good God—Yes!”
“Oh!” she wailed. “I thought I was going over. I didn’t know—”
He helped her gently to her feet and boosted her onto his saddle.
So they started homeward; Amory walking and she bent forward on
the pommel, sobbing bitterly.
“I’ve got a crazy streak,” she faltered, “twice before I’ve done
things like that. When I was eleven mother went—went mad—stark
raving crazy. We were in Vienna—”
All the way back she talked haltingly about herself, and Amory’s
love waned slowly with the moon. At her door they started from
habit to kiss good night, but she could not run into his arms,
nor were they stretched to meet her as in the week before. For a
minute they stood there, hating each other with a bitter sadness.
But as Amory had loved himself in Eleanor, so now what he hated
was only a mirror. Their poses were strewn about the pale dawn
like broken glass. The stars were long gone and there were left
only the little sighing gusts of wind and the silences between...
but naked souls are poor things ever, and soon he turned homeward
and let new lights come in with the sun.
A POEM THAT ELEANOR SENT AMORY SEVERAL YEARS LATER
“Here, Earth-born, over the lilt of the water, Lisping its music and
bearing a burden of light, Bosoming day as a laughing and radiant
daughter... Here we may whisper unheard, unafraid of the night.
Walking alone... was it splendor, or what, we were bound with, Deep in
the time when summer lets down her hair? Shadows we loved and the
patterns they covered the ground with Tapestries, mystical, faint in
the breathless air.
That was the day... and the night for another story, Pale as a dream
and shadowed with pencilled trees— Ghosts of the stars came by who
had sought for glory, Whispered to us of peace in the plaintive
breeze, Whispered of old dead faiths that the day had shattered,
Youth the penny that bought delight of the moon; That was the urge
that we knew and the language that mattered That was the debt that we
paid to the usurer June.
Here, deepest of dreams, by the waters that bring not Anything back
of the past that we need not know, What if the light is but sun and
the little streams sing not, We are together, it seems... I have
loved you so... What did the last night hold, with the summer over,
Drawing us back to the home in the changing glade? _What leered out
of the dark in the ghostly clover?_ God!... till you stirred in your
sleep... and were wild afraid...
Well... we have passed... we are chronicle now to the eerie. Curious
metal from meteors that failed in the sky; Earth-born the tireless is
stretched by the water, quite weary, Close to this ununderstandable
changeling that’s I... Fear is an echo we traced to Security’s
daughter; Now we are faces and voices... and less, too soon,
Whispering half-love over the lilt of the water... Youth the penny
that bought delight of the moon.”
A POEM AMORY SENT TO ELEANOR AND WHICH HE CALLED “SUMMER STORM”
“Faint winds, and a song fading and leaves falling, Faint winds, and
far away a fading laughter... And the rain and over the fields a
voice calling...
Our gray blown cloud scurries and lifts above, Slides on the sun
and flutters there to waft her Sisters on. The shadow of a dove
Falls on the cote, the trees are filled with wings; And down the
valley through the crying trees The body of the darker storm flies;
brings With its new air the breath of sunken seas And slender
tenuous thunder... But I wait... Wait for the mists and for the
blacker rain— Heavier winds that stir the veil of fate, Happier
winds that pile her hair; Again They tear me, teach me, strew the
heavy air Upon me, winds that I know, and storm.
There was a summer every rain was rare; There was a season every
wind was warm.... And now you pass me in the mist... your hair
Rain-blown about you, damp lips curved once more In that wild
irony, that gay despair That made you old when we have met before;
Wraith-like you drift on out before the rain, Across the fields,
blown with the stemless flowers, With your old hopes, dead leaves
and loves again— Dim as a dream and wan with all old hours
(Whispers will creep into the growing dark... Tumult will die over
the trees) Now night Tears from her wetted breast the splattered
blouse Of day, glides down the dreaming hills, tear-bright, To
cover with her hair the eerie green... Love for the dusk... Love
for the glistening after; Quiet the trees to their last tops...
serene...
Faint winds, and far away a fading laughter...”
CHAPTER 4. The Supercilious Sacrifice
Atlantic City. Amory paced the board walk at day’s end, lulled by
the everlasting surge of changing waves, smelling the
half-mournful odor of the salt breeze. The sea, he thought, had
treasured its memories deeper than the faithless land. It seemed
still to whisper of Norse galleys ploughing the water world under
raven-figured flags, of the British dreadnoughts, gray bulwarks
of civilization steaming up through the fog of one dark July into
the North Sea.
“Well—Amory Blaine!”
Amory looked down into the street below. A low racing car had
drawn to a stop and a familiar cheerful face protruded from the
driver’s seat.
“Come on down, goopher!” cried Alec.
Amory called a greeting and descending a flight of wooden steps
approached the car. He and Alec had been meeting intermittently,
but the barrier of Rosalind lay always between them. He was sorry
for this; he hated to lose Alec.
“Mr. Blaine, this is Miss Waterson, Miss Wayne, and Mr. Tully.”
“How d’y do?”
“Amory,” said Alec exuberantly, “if you’ll jump in we’ll take you
to some secluded nook and give you a wee jolt of Bourbon.”
Amory considered.
“That’s an idea.”
“Step in—move over, Jill, and Amory will smile very handsomely at
you.”
Amory squeezed into the back seat beside a gaudy,
vermilion-lipped blonde.
“Hello, Doug Fairbanks,” she said flippantly. “Walking for
exercise or hunting for company?”
“I was counting the waves,” replied Amory gravely. “I’m going in
for statistics.”
“Don’t kid me, Doug.”
When they reached an unfrequented side street Alec stopped the
car among deep shadows.
“What you doing down here these cold days, Amory?” he demanded,
as he produced a quart of Bourbon from under the fur rug.
Amory avoided the question. Indeed, he had had no definite reason
for coming to the coast.
“Do you remember that party of ours, sophomore year?” he asked
instead.
“Do I? When we slept in the pavilions up in Asbury Park—”
“Lord, Alec! It’s hard to think that Jesse and Dick and Kerry are
all three dead.”
Alec shivered.
“Don’t talk about it. These dreary fall days depress me enough.”
Jill seemed to agree.
“Doug here is sorta gloomy anyways,” she commented. “Tell him to
drink deep—it’s good and scarce these days.”
“What I really want to ask you, Amory, is where you are—”
“Why, New York, I suppose—”
“I mean to-night, because if you haven’t got a room yet you’d
better help me out.”
“Glad to.”
“You see, Tully and I have two rooms with bath between at the
Ranier, and he’s got to go back to New York. I don’t want to have
to move. Question is, will you occupy one of the rooms?”
Amory was willing, if he could get in right away.
“You’ll find the key in the office; the rooms are in my name.”
Declining further locomotion or further stimulation, Amory left
the car and sauntered back along the board walk to the hotel.
He was in an eddy again, a deep, lethargic gulf, without desire
to work or write, love or dissipate. For the first time in his
life he rather longed for death to roll over his generation,
obliterating their petty fevers and struggles and exultations.
His youth seemed never so vanished as now in the contrast between
the utter loneliness of this visit and that riotous, joyful party
of four years before. Things that had been the merest
commonplaces of his life then, deep sleep, the sense of beauty
around him, all desire, had flown away and the gaps they left
were filled only with the great listlessness of his disillusion.
“To hold a man a woman has to appeal to the worst in him.” This
sentence was the thesis of most of his bad nights, of which he
felt this was to be one. His mind had already started to play
variations on the subject. Tireless passion, fierce jealousy,
longing to possess and crush—these alone were left of all his
love for Rosalind; these remained to him as payment for the loss