This Side of Paradise
of his youth—bitter calomel under the thin sugar of love’s
exaltation.
In his room he undressed and wrapping himself in blankets to keep
out the chill October air drowsed in an armchair by the open
window.
He remembered a poem he had read months before:
“Oh staunch old heart who toiled so long for me, I waste my years
sailing along the sea—”
Yet he had no sense of waste, no sense of the present hope that
waste implied. He felt that life had rejected him.
“Rosalind! Rosalind!” He poured the words softly into the
half-darkness until she seemed to permeate the room; the wet salt
breeze filled his hair with moisture, the rim of a moon seared
the sky and made the curtains dim and ghostly. He fell asleep.
When he awoke it was very late and quiet. The blanket had slipped
partly off his shoulders and he touched his skin to find it damp
and cold.
Then he became aware of a tense whispering not ten feet away.
He became rigid.
“Don’t make a sound!” It was Alec’s voice. “Jill—do you hear me?”
“Yes—” breathed very low, very frightened. They were in the
bathroom.
Then his ears caught a louder sound from somewhere along the
corridor outside. It was a mumbling of men’s voices and a
repeated muffled rapping. Amory threw off the blankets and moved
close to the bathroom door.
“My God!” came the girl’s voice again. “You’ll have to let them
in.”
“Sh!”
Suddenly a steady, insistent knocking began at Amory’s hall door
and simultaneously out of the bathroom came Alec, followed by the
vermilion-lipped girl. They were both clad in pajamas.
“Amory!” an anxious whisper.
“What’s the trouble?”
“It’s house detectives. My God, Amory—they’re just looking for a
test-case—”
“Well, better let them in.”
“You don’t understand. They can get me under the Mann Act.”
The girl followed him slowly, a rather miserable, pathetic figure
in the darkness.
Amory tried to plan quickly.
“You make a racket and let them in your room,” he suggested
anxiously, “and I’ll get her out by this door.”
“They’re here too, though. They’ll watch this door.”
“Can’t you give a wrong name?”
“No chance. I registered under my own name; besides, they’d trail
the auto license number.”
“Say you’re married.”
“Jill says one of the house detectives knows her.”
The girl had stolen to the bed and tumbled upon it; lay there
listening wretchedly to the knocking which had grown gradually to
a pounding. Then came a man’s voice, angry and imperative:
“Open up or we’ll break the door in!”
In the silence when this voice ceased Amory realized that there
were other things in the room besides people... over and around
the figure crouched on the bed there hung an aura, gossamer as a
moonbeam, tainted as stale, weak wine, yet a horror, diffusively
brooding already over the three of them... and over by the window
among the stirring curtains stood something else, featureless and
indistinguishable, yet strangely familiar.... Simultaneously two
great cases presented themselves side by side to Amory; all that
took place in his mind, then, occupied in actual time less than
ten seconds.
The first fact that flashed radiantly on his comprehension was
the great impersonality of sacrifice—he perceived that what we
call love and hate, reward and punishment, had no more to do with
it than the date of the month. He quickly recapitulated the story
of a sacrifice he had heard of in college: a man had cheated in
an examination; his roommate in a gust of sentiment had taken the
entire blame—due to the shame of it the innocent one’s entire
future seemed shrouded in regret and failure, capped by the
ingratitude of the real culprit. He had finally taken his own
life—years afterward the facts had come out. At the time the
story had both puzzled and worried Amory. Now he realized the
truth; that sacrifice was no purchase of freedom. It was like a
great elective office, it was like an inheritance of power—to
certain people at certain times an essential luxury, carrying
with it not a guarantee but a responsibility, not a security but
an infinite risk. Its very momentum might drag him down to
ruin—the passing of the emotional wave that made it possible
might leave the one who made it high and dry forever on an island
of despair.
... Amory knew that afterward Alec would secretly hate him for
having done so much for him....
... All this was flung before Amory like an opened scroll, while
ulterior to him and speculating upon him were those two
breathless, listening forces: the gossamer aura that hung over
and about the girl and that familiar thing by the window.
Sacrifice by its very nature was arrogant and impersonal;
sacrifice should be eternally supercilious.
_Weep not for me but for thy children._
That—thought Amory—would be somehow the way God would talk to me.
Amory felt a sudden surge of joy and then like a face in a
motion-picture the aura over the bed faded out; the dynamic
shadow by the window, that was as near as he could name it,
remained for the fraction of a moment and then the breeze seemed
to lift it swiftly out of the room. He clinched his hands in
quick ecstatic excitement... the ten seconds were up....
“Do what I say, Alec—do what I say. Do you understand?”
Alec looked at him dumbly—his face a tableau of anguish.
“You have a family,” continued Amory slowly. “You have a family
and it’s important that you should get out of this. Do you hear
me?” He repeated clearly what he had said. “Do you hear me?”
“I hear you.” The voice was curiously strained, the eyes never
for a second left Amory’s.
“Alec, you’re going to lie down here. If any one comes in you act
drunk. You do what I say—if you don’t I’ll probably kill you.”
There was another moment while they stared at each other. Then
Amory went briskly to the bureau and, taking his pocket-book,
beckoned peremptorily to the girl. He heard one word from Alec
that sounded like “penitentiary,” then he and Jill were in the
bathroom with the door bolted behind them.
“You’re here with me,” he said sternly. “You’ve been with me all
evening.”
She nodded, gave a little half cry.
In a second he had the door of the other room open and three men
entered. There was an immediate flood of electric light and he
stood there blinking.
“You’ve been playing a little too dangerous a game, young man!”
Amory laughed.
“Well?”
The leader of the trio nodded authoritatively at a burly man in a
check suit.
“All right, Olson.”
“I got you, Mr. O’May,” said Olson, nodding. The other two took a
curious glance at their quarry and then withdrew, closing the
door angrily behind them.
The burly man regarded Amory contemptuously.
“Didn’t you ever hear of the Mann Act? Coming down here with
her,” he indicated the girl with his thumb, “with a New York
license on your car—to a hotel like _this_.” He shook his head
implying that he had struggled over Amory but now gave him up.
“Well,” said Amory rather impatiently, “what do you want us to
do?”
“Get dressed, quick—and tell your friend not to make such a
racket.” Jill was sobbing noisily on the bed, but at these words
she subsided sulkily and, gathering up her clothes, retired to
the bathroom. As Amory slipped into Alec’s B. V. D.’s he found
that his attitude toward the situation was agreeably humorous.
The aggrieved virtue of the burly man made him want to laugh.
“Anybody else here?” demanded Olson, trying to look keen and
ferret-like.
“Fellow who had the rooms,” said Amory carelessly. “He’s drunk as
an owl, though. Been in there asleep since six o’clock.”
“I’ll take a look at him presently.”
“How did you find out?” asked Amory curiously.
“Night clerk saw you go up-stairs with this woman.”
Amory nodded; Jill reappeared from the bathroom, completely if
rather untidily arrayed.
“Now then,” began Olson, producing a note-book, “I want your real
names—no damn John Smith or Mary Brown.”
“Wait a minute,” said Amory quietly. “Just drop that big-bully
stuff. We merely got caught, that’s all.”
Olson glared at him.
“Name?” he snapped.
Amory gave his name and New York address.
“And the lady?”
“Miss Jill—”
“Say,” cried Olson indignantly, “just ease up on the nursery
rhymes. What’s your name? Sarah Murphy? Minnie Jackson?”
“Oh, my God!” cried the girl cupping her tear-stained face in her
hands. “I don’t want my mother to know. I don’t want my mother to
know.”
“Come on now!”
“Shut up!” cried Amory at Olson.
An instant’s pause.
“Stella Robbins,” she faltered finally. “General Delivery,
Rugway, New Hampshire.”
Olson snapped his note-book shut and looked at them very
ponderously.
“By rights the hotel could turn the evidence over to the police
and you’d go to penitentiary, you would, for bringin’ a girl from
one State to ’nother f’r immoral purp’ses—” He paused to let the
majesty of his words sink in. “But—the hotel is going to let you
off.”
“It doesn’t want to get in the papers,” cried Jill fiercely. “Let
us off! Huh!”
A great lightness surrounded Amory. He realized that he was safe
and only then did he appreciate the full enormity of what he
might have incurred.
“However,” continued Olson, “there’s a protective association
among the hotels. There’s been too much of this stuff, and we got
a ’rangement with the newspapers so that you get a little free
publicity. Not the name of the hotel, but just a line sayin’ that
you had a little trouble in ’lantic City. See?”
“I see.”
“You’re gettin’ off light—damn light—but—”
“Come on,” said Amory briskly. “Let’s get out of here. We don’t
need a valedictory.”
Olson walked through the bathroom and took a cursory glance at
Alec’s still form. Then he extinguished the lights and motioned
them to follow him. As they walked into the elevator Amory
considered a piece of bravado—yielded finally. He reached out and
tapped Olson on the arm.
“Would you mind taking off your hat? There’s a lady in the
elevator.”
Olson’s hat came off slowly. There was a rather embarrassing two
minutes under the lights of the lobby while the night clerk and a
few belated guests stared at them curiously; the loudly dressed
girl with bent head, the handsome young man with his chin several
points aloft; the inference was quite obvious. Then the chill
outdoors—where the salt air was fresher and keener still with the
first hints of morning.
“You can get one of those taxis and beat it,” said Olson,
pointing to the blurred outline of two machines whose drivers
were presumably asleep inside.