This Side of Paradise
virtue he gives off. Sarah makes an unsophisticated remark and
the faces simper in delight—“How _innocent_ the poor child is!”
They’re warming themselves at her virtue. But Sarah sees the
simper and never makes that remark again. Only she feels a little
colder after that.
Q.—All your calories gone?
A.—All of them. I’m beginning to warm myself at other people’s
virtue.
Q.—Are you corrupt?
A.—I think so. I’m not sure. I’m not sure about good and evil at
all any more.
Q.—Is that a bad sign in itself?
A.—Not necessarily.
Q.—What would be the test of corruption?
A.—Becoming really insincere—calling myself “not such a bad
fellow,” thinking I regretted my lost youth when I only envy the
delights of losing it. Youth is like having a big plate of candy.
Sentimentalists think they want to be in the pure, simple state
they were in before they ate the candy. They don’t. They just
want the fun of eating it all over again. The matron doesn’t want
to repeat her girlhood—she wants to repeat her honeymoon. I don’t
want to repeat my innocence. I want the pleasure of losing it
again.
Q.—Where are you drifting?
This dialogue merged grotesquely into his mind’s most familiar
state—a grotesque blending of desires, worries, exterior
impressions and physical reactions.
One Hundred and Twenty-seventh Street—or One Hundred and
Thirty-seventh Street.... Two and three look alike—no, not much.
Seat damp... are clothes absorbing wetness from seat, or seat
absorbing dryness from clothes?... Sitting on wet substance gave
appendicitis, so Froggy Parker’s mother said. Well, he’d had
it—I’ll sue the steamboat company, Beatrice said, and my uncle
has a quarter interest—did Beatrice go to heaven?... probably
not—He represented Beatrice’s immortality, also love-affairs of
numerous dead men who surely had never thought of him... if it
wasn’t appendicitis, influenza maybe. What? One Hundred and
Twentieth Street? That must have been One Hundred and Twelfth
back there. One O Two instead of One Two Seven. Rosalind not like
Beatrice, Eleanor like Beatrice, only wilder and brainier.
Apartments along here expensive—probably hundred and fifty a
month—maybe two hundred. Uncle had only paid hundred a month for
whole great big house in Minneapolis. Question—were the stairs on
the left or right as you came in? Anyway, in 12 Univee they were
straight back and to the left. What a dirty river—want to go down
there and see if it’s dirty—French rivers all brown or black, so
were Southern rivers. Twenty-four dollars meant four hundred and
eighty doughnuts. He could live on it three months and sleep in
the park. Wonder where Jill was—Jill Bayne, Fayne, Sayne—what the
devil—neck hurts, darned uncomfortable seat. No desire to sleep
with Jill, what could Alec see in her? Alec had a coarse taste in
women. Own taste the best; Isabelle, Clara, Rosalind, Eleanor,
were all-American. Eleanor would pitch, probably southpaw.
Rosalind was outfield, wonderful hitter, Clara first base, maybe.
Wonder what Humbird’s body looked like now. If he himself hadn’t
been bayonet instructor he’d have gone up to line three months
sooner, probably been killed. Where’s the darned bell—
The street numbers of Riverside Drive were obscured by the mist
and dripping trees from anything but the swiftest scrutiny, but
Amory had finally caught sight of one—One Hundred and
Twenty-seventh Street. He got off and with no distinct
destination followed a winding, descending sidewalk and came out
facing the river, in particular a long pier and a partitioned
litter of shipyards for miniature craft: small launches, canoes,
rowboats, and catboats. He turned northward and followed the
shore, jumped a small wire fence and found himself in a great
disorderly yard adjoining a dock. The hulls of many boats in
various stages of repair were around him; he smelled sawdust and
paint and the scarcely distinguishable fiat odor of the Hudson. A
man approached through the heavy gloom.
“Hello,” said Amory.
“Got a pass?”
“No. Is this private?”
“This is the Hudson River Sporting and Yacht Club.”
“Oh! I didn’t know. I’m just resting.”
“Well—” began the man dubiously.
“I’ll go if you want me to.”
The man made non-committal noises in his throat and passed on.
Amory seated himself on an overturned boat and leaned forward
thoughtfully until his chin rested in his hand.
“Misfortune is liable to make me a damn bad man,” he said slowly.
IN THE DROOPING HOURS
While the rain drizzled on Amory looked futilely back at the
stream of his life, all its glitterings and dirty shallows. To
begin with, he was still afraid—not physically afraid any more,
but afraid of people and prejudice and misery and monotony. Yet,
deep in his bitter heart, he wondered if he was after all worse
than this man or the next. He knew that he could sophisticate
himself finally into saying that his own weakness was just the
result of circumstances and environment; that often when he raged
at himself as an egotist something would whisper ingratiatingly:
“No. Genius!” That was one manifestation of fear, that voice
which whispered that he could not be both great and good, that
genius was the exact combination of those inexplicable grooves
and twists in his mind, that any discipline would curb it to
mediocrity. Probably more than any concrete vice or failing Amory
despised his own personality—he loathed knowing that to-morrow
and the thousand days after he would swell pompously at a
compliment and sulk at an ill word like a third-rate musician or
a first-class actor. He was ashamed of the fact that very simple
and honest people usually distrusted him; that he had been cruel,
often, to those who had sunk their personalities in him—several
girls, and a man here and there through college, that he had been
an evil influence on; people who had followed him here and there
into mental adventures from which he alone rebounded unscathed.
Usually, on nights like this, for there had been many lately, he
could escape from this consuming introspection by thinking of
children and the infinite possibilities of children—he leaned and
listened and he heard a startled baby awake in a house across the
street and lend a tiny whimper to the still night. Quick as a
flash he turned away, wondering with a touch of panic whether
something in the brooding despair of his mood had made a darkness
in its tiny soul. He shivered. What if some day the balance was
overturned, and he became a thing that frightened children and
crept into rooms in the dark, approached dim communion with those
phantoms who whispered shadowy secrets to the mad of that dark
continent upon the moon....
Amory smiled a bit.
“You’re too much wrapped up in yourself,” he heard some one say.
And again—
“Get out and do some real work—”
“Stop worrying—”
He fancied a possible future comment of his own.
“Yes—I was perhaps an egotist in youth, but I soon found it made
me morbid to think too much about myself.”
Suddenly he felt an overwhelming desire to let himself go to the
devil—not to go violently as a gentleman should, but to sink
safely and sensuously out of sight. He pictured himself in an
adobe house in Mexico, half-reclining on a rug-covered couch, his
slender, artistic fingers closed on a cigarette while he listened
to guitars strumming melancholy undertones to an age-old dirge of
Castile and an olive-skinned, carmine-lipped girl caressed his
hair. Here he might live a strange litany, delivered from right
and wrong and from the hound of heaven and from every God (except
the exotic Mexican one who was pretty slack himself and rather
addicted to Oriental scents)—delivered from success and hope and
poverty into that long chute of indulgence which led, after all,
only to the artificial lake of death.
There were so many places where one might deteriorate pleasantly:
Port Said, Shanghai, parts of Turkestan, Constantinople, the
South Seas—all lands of sad, haunting music and many odors, where
lust could be a mode and expression of life, where the shades of
night skies and sunsets would seem to reflect only moods of
passion: the colors of lips and poppies.
STILL WEEDING
Once he had been miraculously able to scent evil as a horse
detects a broken bridge at night, but the man with the queer feet
in Phoebe’s room had diminished to the aura over Jill. His
instinct perceived the fetidness of poverty, but no longer
ferreted out the deeper evils in pride and sensuality.
There were no more wise men; there were no more heroes; Burne
Holiday was sunk from sight as though he had never lived;
Monsignor was dead. Amory had grown up to a thousand books, a
thousand lies; he had listened eagerly to people who pretended to
know, who knew nothing. The mystical reveries of saints that had
once filled him with awe in the still hours of night, now vaguely
repelled him. The Byrons and Brookes who had defied life from
mountain tops were in the end but flaneurs and poseurs, at best
mistaking the shadow of courage for the substance of wisdom. The
pageantry of his disillusion took shape in a world-old procession
of Prophets, Athenians, Martyrs, Saints, Scientists, Don Juans,
Jesuits, Puritans, Fausts, Poets, Pacifists; like costumed alumni
at a college reunion they streamed before him as their dreams,
personalities, and creeds had in turn thrown colored lights on
his soul; each had tried to express the glory of life and the
tremendous significance of man; each had boasted of synchronizing
what had gone before into his own rickety generalities; each had
depended after all on the set stage and the convention of the
theatre, which is that man in his hunger for faith will feed his
mind with the nearest and most convenient food.
Women—of whom he had expected so much; whose beauty he had hoped
to transmute into modes of art; whose unfathomable instincts,
marvellously incoherent and inarticulate, he had thought to
perpetuate in terms of experience—had become merely consecrations
to their own posterity. Isabelle, Clara, Rosalind, Eleanor, were
all removed by their very beauty, around which men had swarmed,
from the possibility of contributing anything but a sick heart
and a page of puzzled words to write.
Amory based his loss of faith in help from others on several
sweeping syllogisms. Granted that his generation, however bruised
and decimated from this Victorian war, were the heirs of
progress. Waving aside petty differences of conclusions which,
although they might occasionally cause the deaths of several
millions of young men, might be explained away—supposing that
after all Bernard Shaw and Bernhardi, Bonar Law and