“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 withTapestries, 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 matteredThat was the debt that we paid to the usurer June.Here, deepest of dreams, by the waters that bring notAnything 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 wildafraid...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 herSisters on. The shadow of a doveFalls on the cote, the trees are filled with wings;And down the valley through the crying treesThe body of the darker storm flies; bringsWith its new air the breath of sunken seasAnd 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;AgainThey tear me, teach me, strew the heavy airUpon 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 hairRain-blown about you, damp lips curved once moreIn that wild irony, that gay despairThat 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 nightTears from her wetted breast the splattered blouseOf 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...”
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 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 likethis.” 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.
“Good-by,” said Olson. He reached in his pocket suggestively, but Amory snorted, and, taking the girl’s arm, turned away.
“Where did you tell the driver to go?” she asked as they whirled along the dim street.
“The station.”
“If that guy writes my mother—”
“He won’t. Nobody’ll ever know about this—except our friends and enemies.”
Dawn was breaking over the sea.
“It’s getting blue,” she said.
“It does very well,” agreed Amory critically, and then as an after-thought: “It’s almost breakfast-time—do you want something to eat?”
“Food—” she said with a cheerful laugh. “Food is what queered the party. We ordered a big supper to be sent up to the room about two o’clock. Alec didn’t give the waiter a tip, so I guess the little bastard snitched.”
Jill’s low spirits seemed to have gone faster than the scattering night. “Let me tell you,” she said emphatically, “when you want to stage that sorta party stay away from liquor, and when you want to get tight stay away from bedrooms.”
“I’ll remember.”
He tapped suddenly at the glass and they drew up at the door of an all-night restaurant.
“Is Alec a great friend of yours?” asked Jill as they perched themselves on high stools inside, and set their elbows on the dingy counter.
“He used to be. He probably won’t want to be any more—and never understand why.”
“It was sorta crazy you takin’ all that blame. Is he pretty important? Kinda more important than you are?”
Amory laughed.
“That remains to be seen,” he answered. “That’s the question.”
THE COLLAPSE OF SEVERAL PILLARS
Two days later back in New York Amory found in a newspaper what he had been searching for—a dozen lines which announced to whom it might concern that Mr. Amory Blaine, who “gave his address” as, etc., had been requested to leave his hotel in Atlantic City because of entertaining in his room a ladynothis wife.
Then he started, and his fingers trembled, for directly above was a longer paragraph of which the first words were:
“Mr. and Mrs. Leland R. Connage are announcing the engagement of their daughter, Rosalind, to Mr. J. Dawson Ryder, of Hartford, Connecticut—”
He dropped the paper and lay down on his bed with a frightened, sinking sensation in the pit of his stomach. She was gone, definitely, finally gone. Until now he had half unconsciously cherished the hope deep in his heart that some day she would need him and send for him, cry that it had been a mistake, that her heart ached only for the pain she had caused him. Never again could he find even the sombre luxury of wanting her—not this Rosalind, harder, older—nor any beaten, broken woman that his imagination brought to the door of his forties—Amory had wanted her youth, the fresh radiance of her mind and body, the stuff that she was selling now once and for all. So far as he was concerned, young Rosalind was dead.
A day later came a crisp, terse letter from Mr. Barton in Chicago, which informed him that as three more street-car companies had gone into the hands of receivers he could expect for the present no further remittances. Last of all, on a dazed Sunday night, a telegram told him of Monsignor Darcy’s sudden death in Philadelphia five days before.
He knew then what it was that he had perceived among the curtains of the room in Atlantic City.
“A fathom deep in sleep I lieWith old desires, restrained before,To clamor lifeward with a cry,As dark flies out the greying door;And so in quest of creeds to shareI seek assertive day again...But old monotony is there:Endless avenues of rain.Oh, might I rise again! Might IThrow off the heat of that old wine,See the new morning mass the skyWith fairy towers, line on line;Find each mirage in the high airA symbol, not a dream again...But old monotony is there:Endless avenues of rain.”
Under the glass portcullis of a theatre Amory stood, watching the first great drops of rain splatter down and flatten to dark stains on the sidewalk. The air became gray and opalescent; a solitary light suddenly outlined a window over the way; then another light; then a hundred more danced and glimmered into vision. Under his feet a thick, iron-studded skylight turned yellow; in the street the lamps of the taxi-cabs sent out glistening sheens along the already black pavement. The unwelcome November rain had perversely stolen the day’s last hour and pawned it with that ancient fence, the night.
The silence of the theatre behind him ended with a curious snapping sound, followed by the heavy roaring of a rising crowd and the interlaced clatter of many voices. The matinee was over.
He stood aside, edged a little into the rain to let the throng pass. A small boy rushed out, sniffed in the damp, fresh air and turned up the collar of his coat; came three or four couples in a great hurry; came a further scattering of people whose eyes as they emerged glanced invariably, first at the wet street, then at the rain-filled air, finally at the dismal sky; last a dense, strolling mass that depressed him with its heavy odor compounded of the tobacco smell of the men and the fetid sensuousness of stale powder on women. After the thick crowd came another scattering; a stray half-dozen; a man on crutches; finally the rattling bang of folding seats inside announced that the ushers were at work.
New York seemed not so much awakening as turning over in its bed. Pallid men rushed by, pinching together their coat-collars; a great swarm of tired, magpie girls from a department-store crowded along with shrieks of strident laughter, three to an umbrella; a squad of marching policemen passed, already miraculously protected by oilskin capes.
The rain gave Amory a feeling of detachment, and the numerous unpleasant aspects of city life without money occurred to him in threatening procession. There was the ghastly, stinking crush of the subway—the car cards thrusting themselves at one, leering out like dull bores who grab your arm with another story; the querulous worry as to whether some one isn’t leaning on you; a man deciding not to give his seat to a woman, hating her for it; the woman hating him for not doing it; at worst a squalid phantasmagoria of breath, and old cloth on human bodies and the smells of the food men ate—at best just people—too hot or too cold, tired, worried.
He pictured the rooms where these people lived—where the patterns of the blistered wall-papers were heavy reiterated sunflowers on green and yellow backgrounds, where there were tin bathtubs and gloomy hallways and verdureless, unnamable spaces in back of the buildings; where even love dressed as seduction—a sordid murder around the corner, illicit motherhood in the flat above. And always there was the economical stuffiness of indoor winter, and the long summers, nightmares of perspiration between sticky enveloping walls... dirty restaurants where careless, tired people helped themselves to sugar with their own used coffee-spoons, leaving hard brown deposits in the bowl.
It was not so bad where there were only men or else only women; it was when they were vilely herded that it all seemed so rotten. It was some shame that women gave off at having men see them tired and poor—it was some disgust that men had for women who were tired and poor. It was dirtier than any battle-field he had seen, harder to contemplate than any actual hardship moulded of mire and sweat and danger, it was an atmosphere wherein birth and marriage and death were loathsome, secret things.
He remembered one day in the subway when a delivery boy had brought in a great funeral wreath of fresh flowers, how the smell of it had suddenly cleared the air and given every one in the car a momentary glow.
“I detest poor people,” thought Amory suddenly. “I hate them for being poor. Poverty may have been beautiful once, but it’s rotten now. It’s the ugliest thing in the world. It’s essentially cleaner to be corrupt and rich than it is to be innocent and poor.” He seemed to see again a figure whose significance had once impressed him—a well-dressed young man gazing from a club window on Fifth Avenue and saying something to his companion with a look of utter disgust. Probably, thought Amory, what he said was: “My God! Aren’t people horrible!”
Never before in his life had Amory considered poor people. He thought cynically how completely he was lacking in all human sympathy. O. Henry had found in these people romance, pathos, love, hate—Amory saw only coarseness, physical filth, and stupidity. He made no self-accusations: never any more did he reproach himself for feelings that were natural and sincere. He accepted all his reactions as a part of him, unchangeable, unmoral. This problem of poverty transformed, magnified, attached to some grander, more dignified attitude might some day even be his problem; at present it roused only his profound distaste.
He walked over to Fifth Avenue, dodging the blind, black menace of umbrellas, and standing in front of Delmonico’s hailed an auto-bus. Buttoning his coat closely around him he climbed to the roof, where he rode in solitary state through the thin, persistent rain, stung into alertness by the cool moisture perpetually reborn on his cheek. Somewhere in his mind a conversation began, rather resumed its place in his attention. It was composed not of two voices, but of one, which acted alike as questioner and answerer:
Question.—Well—what’s the situation?
Answer.—That I have about twenty-four dollars to my name.
Q.—You have the Lake Geneva estate.
A.—But I intend to keep it.
Q.—Can you live?
A.—I can’t imagine not being able to. People make money in books and I’ve found that I can always do the things that people do in books. Really they are the only things I can do.
Q.—Be definite.
A.—I don’t know what I’ll do—nor have I much curiosity. To-morrow I’m going to leave New York for good. It’s a bad town unless you’re on top of it.
Q.—Do you want a lot of money?
A.—No. I am merely afraid of being poor.
Q.—Very afraid?
A.—Just passively afraid.
Q.—Where are you drifting?
A.—Don’t askme!
Q.—Don’t you care?
A.—Rather. I don’t want to commit moral suicide.
Q.—Have you no interests left?
A.—None. I’ve no more virtue to lose. Just as a cooling pot gives off heat, so all through youth and adolescence we give off calories of virtue. That’s what’s called ingenuousness.
Q.—An interesting idea.
A.—That’s why a “good man going wrong” attracts people. They stand around and literallywarm themselvesat the calories of virtue he gives off. Sarah makes an unsophisticated remark and the faces simper in delight—“Howinnocentthe 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 Bethmann-Hollweg were mutual heirs of progress if only in agreeing against the ducking of witches—waiving the antitheses and approaching individually these men who seemed to be the leaders, he was repelled by the discrepancies and contradictions in the men themselves.
There was, for example, Thornton Hancock, respected by half the intellectual world as an authority on life, a man who had verified and believed the code he lived by, an educator of educators, an adviser to Presidents—yet Amory knew that this man had, in his heart, leaned on the priest of another religion.
And Monsignor, upon whom a cardinal rested, had moments of strange and horrible insecurity—inexplicable in a religion that explained even disbelief in terms of its own faith: if you doubted the devil it was the devil that made you doubt him. Amory had seen Monsignor go to the houses of stolid philistines, read popular novels furiously, saturate himself in routine, to escape from that horror.
And this priest, a little wiser, somewhat purer, had been, Amory knew, not essentially older than he.
Amory was alone—he had escaped from a small enclosure into a great labyrinth. He was where Goethe was when he began “Faust”; he was where Conrad was when he wrote “Almayer’s Folly.”
Amory said to himself that there were essentially two sorts of people who through natural clarity or disillusion left the enclosure and sought the labyrinth. There were men like Wells and Plato, who had, half unconsciously, a strange, hidden orthodoxy, who would accept for themselves only what could be accepted for all men—incurable romanticists who never, for all their efforts, could enter the labyrinth as stark souls; there were on the other hand sword-like pioneering personalities, Samuel Butler, Renan, Voltaire, who progressed much slower, yet eventually much further, not in the direct pessimistic line of speculative philosophy but concerned in the eternal attempt to attach a positive value to life....
Amory stopped. He began for the first time in his life to have a strong distrust of all generalities and epigrams. They were too easy, too dangerous to the public mind. Yet all thought usually reached the public after thirty years in some such form: Benson and Chesterton had popularized Huysmans and Newman; Shaw had sugar-coated Nietzsche and Ibsen and Schopenhauer. The man in the street heard the conclusions of dead genius through some one else’s clever paradoxes and didactic epigrams.
Life was a damned muddle... a football game with every one off-side and the referee gotten rid of—every one claiming the referee would have been on his side....
Progress was a labyrinth... people plunging blindly in and then rushing wildly back, shouting that they had found it... the invisible king—the elan vital—the principle of evolution... writing a book, starting a war, founding a school....
Amory, even had he not been a selfish man, would have started all inquiries with himself. He was his own best example—sitting in the rain, a human creature of sex and pride, foiled by chance and his own temperament of the balm of love and children, preserved to help in building up the living consciousness of the race.
In self-reproach and loneliness and disillusion he came to the entrance of the labyrinth.
Another dawn flung itself across the river, a belated taxi hurried along the street, its lamps still shining like burning eyes in a face white from a night’s carouse. A melancholy siren sounded far down the river.
MONSIGNOR
Amory kept thinking how Monsignor would have enjoyed his own funeral. It was magnificently Catholic and liturgical. Bishop O’Neill sang solemn high mass and the cardinal gave the final absolutions. Thornton Hancock, Mrs. Lawrence, the British and Italian ambassadors, the papal delegate, and a host of friends and priests were there—yet the inexorable shears had cut through all these threads that Monsignor had gathered into his hands. To Amory it was a haunting grief to see him lying in his coffin, with closed hands upon his purple vestments. His face had not changed, and, as he never knew he was dying, it showed no pain or fear. It was Amory’s dear old friend, his and the others’—for the church was full of people with daft, staring faces, the most exalted seeming the most stricken.
The cardinal, like an archangel in cope and mitre, sprinkled the holy water; the organ broke into sound; the choir began to sing the Requiem Eternam.
All these people grieved because they had to some extent depended upon Monsignor. Their grief was more than sentiment for the “crack in his voice or a certain break in his walk,” as Wells put it. These people had leaned on Monsignor’s faith, his way of finding cheer, of making religion a thing of lights and shadows, making all light and shadow merely aspects of God. People felt safe when he was near.
Of Amory’s attempted sacrifice had been born merely the full realization of his disillusion, but of Monsignor’s funeral was born the romantic elf who was to enter the labyrinth with him. He found something that he wanted, had always wanted and always would want—not to be admired, as he had feared; not to be loved, as he had made himself believe; but to be necessary to people, to be indispensable; he remembered the sense of security he had found in Burne.
Life opened up in one of its amazing bursts of radiance and Amory suddenly and permanently rejected an old epigram that had been playing listlessly in his mind: “Very few things matter and nothing matters very much.”
On the contrary, Amory felt an immense desire to give people a sense of security.
THE BIG MAN WITH GOGGLES
On the day that Amory started on his walk to Princeton the sky was a colorless vault, cool, high and barren of the threat of rain. It was a gray day, that least fleshly of all weathers; a day of dreams and far hopes and clear visions. It was a day easily associated with those abstract truths and purities that dissolve in the sunshine or fade out in mocking laughter by the light of the moon. The trees and clouds were carved in classical severity; the sounds of the countryside had harmonized to a monotone, metallic as a trumpet, breathless as the Grecian urn.
The day had put Amory in such a contemplative mood that he caused much annoyance to several motorists who were forced to slow up considerably or else run him down. So engrossed in his thoughts was he that he was scarcely surprised at that strange phenomenon—cordiality manifested within fifty miles of Manhattan—when a passing car slowed down beside him and a voice hailed him. He looked up and saw a magnificent Locomobile in which sat two middle-aged men, one of them small and anxious looking, apparently an artificial growth on the other who was large and begoggled and imposing.
“Do you want a lift?” asked the apparently artificial growth, glancing from the corner of his eye at the imposing man as if for some habitual, silent corroboration.
“You bet I do. Thanks.”
The chauffeur swung open the door, and, climbing in, Amory settled himself in the middle of the back seat. He took in his companions curiously. The chief characteristic of the big man seemed to be a great confidence in himself set off against a tremendous boredom with everything around him. That part of his face which protruded under the goggles was what is generally termed “strong”; rolls of not undignified fat had collected near his chin; somewhere above was a wide thin mouth and the rough model for a Roman nose, and, below, his shoulders collapsed without a struggle into the powerful bulk of his chest and belly. He was excellently and quietly dressed. Amory noticed that he was inclined to stare straight at the back of the chauffeur’s head as if speculating steadily but hopelessly some baffling hirsute problem.
The smaller man was remarkable only for his complete submersion in the personality of the other. He was of that lower secretarial type who at forty have engraved upon their business cards: “Assistant to the President,” and without a sigh consecrate the rest of their lives to second-hand mannerisms.
“Going far?” asked the smaller man in a pleasant disinterested way.
“Quite a stretch.”
“Hiking for exercise?”
“No,” responded Amory succinctly, “I’m walking because I can’t afford to ride.”
“Oh.”
Then again:
“Are you looking for work? Because there’s lots of work,” he continued rather testily. “All this talk of lack of work. The West is especially short of labor.” He expressed the West with a sweeping, lateral gesture. Amory nodded politely.
“Have you a trade?”
No—Amory had no trade.
“Clerk, eh?”
No—Amory was not a clerk.
“Whatever your line is,” said the little man, seeming to agree wisely with something Amory had said, “now is the time of opportunity and business openings.” He glanced again toward the big man, as a lawyer grilling a witness glances involuntarily at the jury.
Amory decided that he must say something and for the life of him could think of only one thing to say.
“Of course I want a great lot of money—”
The little man laughed mirthlessly but conscientiously.
“That’s what every one wants nowadays, but they don’t want to work for it.”
“A very natural, healthy desire. Almost all normal people want to be rich without great effort—except the financiers in problem plays, who want to ‘crash their way through.’ Don’t you want easy money?”
“Of course not,” said the secretary indignantly.
“But,” continued Amory disregarding him, “being very poor at present I am contemplating socialism as possibly my forte.”
Both men glanced at him curiously.
“These bomb throwers—” The little man ceased as words lurched ponderously from the big man’s chest.
“If I thought you were a bomb thrower I’d run you over to the Newark jail. That’s what I think of Socialists.”
Amory laughed.
“What are you,” asked the big man, “one of these parlor Bolsheviks, one of these idealists? I must say I fail to see the difference. The idealists loaf around and write the stuff that stirs up the poor immigrants.”
“Well,” said Amory, “if being an idealist is both safe and lucrative, I might try it.”
“What’s your difficulty? Lost your job?”
“Not exactly, but—well, call it that.”
“What was it?”
“Writing copy for an advertising agency.”
“Lots of money in advertising.”
Amory smiled discreetly.
“Oh, I’ll admit there’s money in it eventually. Talent doesn’t starve any more. Even art gets enough to eat these days. Artists draw your magazine covers, write your advertisements, hash out rag-time for your theatres. By the great commercializing of printing you’ve found a harmless, polite occupation for every genius who might have carved his own niche. But beware the artist who’s an intellectual also. The artist who doesn’t fit—the Rousseau, the Tolstoi, the Samuel Butler, the Amory Blaine—”
“Who’s he?” demanded the little man suspiciously.
“Well,” said Amory, “he’s a—he’s an intellectual personage not very well known at present.”
The little man laughed his conscientious laugh, and stopped rather suddenly as Amory’s burning eyes turned on him.
“What are you laughing at?”
“Theseintellectualpeople—”
“Do you know what it means?”
The little man’s eyes twitched nervously.
“Why, itusuallymeans—”
“Italwaysmeans brainy and well-educated,” interrupted Amory. “It means having an active knowledge of the race’s experience.” Amory decided to be very rude. He turned to the big man. “The young man,” he indicated the secretary with his thumb, and said young man as one says bell-boy, with no implication of youth, “has the usual muddled connotation of all popular words.”
“You object to the fact that capital controls printing?” said the big man, fixing him with his goggles.
“Yes—and I object to doing their mental work for them. It seemed to me that the root of all the business I saw around me consisted in overworking and underpaying a bunch of dubs who submitted to it.”
“Here now,” said the big man, “you’ll have to admit that the laboring man is certainly highly paid—five and six hour days—it’s ridiculous. You can’t buy an honest day’s work from a man in the trades-unions.”
“You’ve brought it on yourselves,” insisted Amory. “You people never make concessions until they’re wrung out of you.”
“What people?”
“Your class; the class I belonged to until recently; those who by inheritance or industry or brains or dishonesty have become the moneyed class.”
“Do you imagine that if that road-mender over there had the money he’d be any more willing to give it up?”
“No, but what’s that got to do with it?”
The older man considered.
“No, I’ll admit it hasn’t. It rather sounds as if it had though.”
“In fact,” continued Amory, “he’d be worse. The lower classes are narrower, less pleasant and personally more selfish—certainly more stupid. But all that has nothing to do with the question.”
“Just exactly what is the question?”
Here Amory had to pause to consider exactly what the question was.
AMORY COINS A PHRASE
“When life gets hold of a brainy man of fair education,” began Amory slowly, “that is, when he marries he becomes, nine times out of ten, a conservative as far as existing social conditions are concerned. He may be unselfish, kind-hearted, even just in his own way, but his first job is to provide and to hold fast. His wife shoos him on, from ten thousand a year to twenty thousand a year, on and on, in an enclosed treadmill that hasn’t any windows. He’s done! Life’s got him! He’s no help! He’s a spiritually married man.”
Amory paused and decided that it wasn’t such a bad phrase.
“Some men,” he continued, “escape the grip. Maybe their wives have no social ambitions; maybe they’ve hit a sentence or two in a ‘dangerous book’ that pleased them; maybe they started on the treadmill as I did and were knocked off. Anyway, they’re the congressmen you can’t bribe, the Presidents who aren’t politicians, the writers, speakers, scientists, statesmen who aren’t just popular grab-bags for a half-dozen women and children.”
“He’s the natural radical?”
“Yes,” said Amory. “He may vary from the disillusioned critic like old Thornton Hancock, all the way to Trotsky. Now this spiritually unmarried man hasn’t direct power, for unfortunately the spiritually married man, as a by-product of his money chase, has garnered in the great newspaper, the popular magazine, the influential weekly—so that Mrs. Newspaper, Mrs. Magazine, Mrs. Weekly can have a better limousine than those oil people across the street or those cement people ’round the corner.”
“Why not?”
“It makes wealthy men the keepers of the world’s intellectual conscience and, of course, a man who has money under one set of social institutions quite naturally can’t risk his family’s happiness by letting the clamor for another appear in his newspaper.”
“But it appears,” said the big man.
“Where?—in the discredited mediums. Rotten cheap-papered weeklies.”
“All right—go on.”
“Well, my first point is that through a mixture of conditions of which the family is the first, there are these two sorts of brains. One sort takes human nature as it finds it, uses its timidity, its weakness, and its strength for its own ends. Opposed is the man who, being spiritually unmarried, continually seeks for new systems that will control or counteract human nature. His problem is harder. It is not life that’s complicated, it’s the struggle to guide and control life. That is his struggle. He is a part of progress—the spiritually married man is not.”
The big man produced three big cigars, and proffered them on his huge palm. The little man took one, Amory shook his head and reached for a cigarette.
“Go on talking,” said the big man. “I’ve been wanting to hear one of you fellows.”
GOING FASTER
“Modern life,” began Amory again, “changes no longer century by century, but year by year, ten times faster than it ever has before—populations doubling, civilizations unified more closely with other civilizations, economic interdependence, racial questions, and—we’redawdlingalong. My idea is that we’ve got to go very much faster.” He slightly emphasized the last words and the chauffeur unconsciously increased the speed of the car. Amory and the big man laughed; the little man laughed, too, after a pause.
“Every child,” said Amory, “should have an equal start. If his father can endow him with a good physique and his mother with some common sense in his early education, that should be his heritage. If the father can’t give him a good physique, if the mother has spent in chasing men the years in which she should have been preparing herself to educate her children, so much the worse for the child. He shouldn’t be artificially bolstered up with money, sent to these horrible tutoring schools, dragged through college... Every boy ought to have an equal start.”
“All right,” said the big man, his goggles indicating neither approval nor objection.
“Next I’d have a fair trial of government ownership of all industries.”
“That’s been proven a failure.”
“No—it merely failed. If we had government ownership we’d have the best analytical business minds in the government working for something besides themselves. We’d have Mackays instead of Burlesons; we’d have Morgans in the Treasury Department; we’d have Hills running interstate commerce. We’d have the best lawyers in the Senate.”
“They wouldn’t give their best efforts for nothing. McAdoo—”
“No,” said Amory, shaking his head. “Money isn’t the only stimulus that brings out the best that’s in a man, even in America.”
“You said a while ago that it was.”
“It is, right now. But if it were made illegal to have more than a certain amount the best men would all flock for the one other reward which attracts humanity—honor.”
The big man made a sound that was very likeboo.