 Book 2. Chapter 2. Part 2. of This Side of Paradise. This side of Paradise by F. Scott Fitzgerald. Book 2. Chapter 2. Part 2. Restlessness. I'm Trey old and Trey bored, Tom," said Amory one day, stretching himself at ease in the comfortable window-seat. He always felt most natural in a recumbent position. "'You used to be entertaining before you started to write,' he continued. "'Now you save any idea that you think would do to print.'" Existence had settled back to an ambitionless normality. They had decided that with economy they could still afford the apartment, which Tom, with the domesticity of an elderly cat, had grown fond of. The old English hunting-prints on the wall were Tom's, and the large tapestry by courtesy, a relic of decadent days in college, and the great perfusion of orphaned candlesticks and the carved Louis XV chair in which no one could sit more than a minute without acute spinal disorders. Tom claimed that this was because one was sitting in the lap of Montespain's Wrath. At any rate it was Tom's furniture that decided them to stay. They went out very little, to an occasional play, or to dinner at the Ritz or the Princeton Club. With prohibition the great rendezvous had received their death wounds. No longer could one wander to the Biltmore Bar at twelve or five and seek congenial spirits, and both Tom and Amory had outgrown the passion for dancing with midwestern or New Jersey debbies at the Club de Vain, surnamed the Club de Gink, or the Plaza Rose Room, because even that required several cocktails to come down to the intellectual level of the women present, as Amory had once put it to a horrified matron. Amory had lately received several alarming letters from Mr. Barton. The Lake Geneva house was too large to be easily rented, the best rent obtainable at present would serve this year to little more than pay for the taxes and necessary improvements. In fact, the lawyer suggested that the whole property was simply a white elephant on Amory's hands. Nevertheless, even though it might not yield a cent for the next three years, Amory decided with a vague sentimentality that for the present, at any rate, he would not sell the house. This particular day, on which he announced his ennui to Tom, had been quite typical. He had risen at noon, lunched with Mrs. Lawrence, and then ridden abstractedly homeward atop one of his beloved buses. "'Why shouldn't you be bored?' yawned Tom. "'Isn't that the conventional frame of mind for the young man of your age and condition?' "'Yes,' said Amory speculatively. "'But I'm more than bored. I'm restless.' "'Love and war did for you.' "'Well,' Amory considered, "'I'm not sure that the war itself had any great effect on either you or me, but it certainly ruined the old backgrounds—sort of killed individualism out of our generation.' Tom looked up in surprise. "'Yes, it did,' insisted Amory. "'I'm not sure it didn't kill it out of the whole world. Oh Lord, what a pleasure it used to be to dream I might be a really great dictator or writer or religious or political leader. And now even a Leonardo da Vinci or Lorenzo de' Medici couldn't be a real old-fashioned bold in the world. Life is too huge and complex. The world is so overgrown that it can't lift its own fingers, and I was planning to be such an important finger.' "'I don't agree with you,' Tom interrupted. "'There never were men placed in such egotistic position since—oh, since the French Revolution!' Amory disagreed violently. "'You're mistaking this period when every nut is an individualist for a period of individualism. Wilson has only been powerful when he is represented. He's had to compromise over and over again. Just as soon as Trotsky and Lennon take a definite, consistent stand, they'll become merely two minute figures like Kerensky. Even Fosh hasn't half the significance of Stonewall Jackson. War used to be the most individualistic pursuit of man, and yet the popular heroes of the war had neither authority nor responsibility. Guy-namer and Sergeant York. How could a schoolboy make a hero of Pershing? A big man has no time really to do anything but just sit and be big.' "'Then you don't think there will be any more permanent world heroes?' "'Yes, in history, not in life. Carlile would have difficulty getting material for a new chapter on the hero as a big man.' "'Go on, I'm a good listener today.' "'People try so hard to believe in leaders now, pitifully hard, but we no sooner get a popular reformer, or politician, or soldier, or writer, or philosopher. A Roosevelt, a Tolstoy, a Wood, a Shaw, a Nietzsche. Then the cross-currents of criticism wash him away. My Lord, no man can stand prominence these days. It's the surest path to obscurity. People get sick of hearing the same name over and over.' "'Then you blame it on the press?' "'Absolutely. Look at you. You're on the new democracy, considered the most brilliant weekly in the country, read by the men who do things and all that. What's your business? Why, to be as clever, as interesting, and as brilliantly cynical as possible, about every man, doctrine, book, or policy that has assigned you to deal with? The more strong lights, the more spiritual scandal you can throw on the matter, the more money they pay you, the more the people buy the issue. "'You,' Tom Domvillier, a blighted Shelley, changing, shifting, clever, unscrupulous, represent the critical consciousness of the race. Don't protest, I know the stuff. I used to write book reviews in college. I considered it rare sport to refer to the latest honest conscientious effort to propound a theory or a remedy as a welcome addition to our light summer reading. Come on now, admit it.' Tom laughed, and Amory continued triumphantly. "'We want to believe. Young students try to believe in older authors. Constituents try to believe in their congressmen. Countries try to believe in their statesmen, but they can't. Too many voices, too much scattered illogical, ill-considered criticism. It's worse in the case of newspapers. Any rich, unprogressive old party with that particularly grasping, acquisitive form of mentality known as financial genius, can own a paper that is the intellectual meat and drink of thousands of tired, hurried men, men too involved in the business of modern living to swallow anything but a predigested food. For two cents the voter buys his politics, prejudices, and philosophy. A year later there is a new political ring or a change in the paper's ownership. Consequence. More confusion. More contradiction. A sudden inrush of new ideas. Their tempering, their distillation, their reaction against them. He paused only to get his breath. And that is why I have sworn not to put pen to paper until my ideas either clarify or depart entirely. I have quite enough sins on my soul without putting dangerous, shallow epigrams into people's heads. I might cause a poor, inoffensive capitalist to have a vulgar liaison with a bomb or get some innocent little Bolshevik tangled up with a machine-gun bullet. Tom was growing restless under this lampooning of his connection with the new democracy. What's all this got to do with your being bored? Amory considered that it had much to do with it. How will I fit in? he demanded. What am I for? To propagate the race? According to the American novels we are led to believe that the healthy American boy, from nineteen to twenty-five, is an entirely sexless animal. As a matter of fact the healthier he is the less that's true. The only alternative to letting it get you is some violent interest. Well, the war is over and I believe too much in the responsibilities of authorship to write, just now. And business speaks for itself. It has no connection with anything in the world that I've ever been interested in, except a slim utilitarian connection with economics. What I'd see of it, lost in a clerkship, for the next and best ten years of my life would have the intellectual content of an industrial movie. Try fiction, suggested Tom. Trouble is, I get distracted when I start to write stories, get afraid of doing it instead of living, get thinking maybe life is waiting for me in the Japanese gardens at the Ritz, or at Atlantic City, or on the Lower East Side. Anyway, he continued, I haven't the vital urge. I wanted to be a regular human being, but the girl couldn't see it that way. You'll find another. God, banished the thought. Why don't you tell me that if the girl had been worth having, she'd have waited for you. No, sir, the girl really worth having won't wait for anybody. If I thought there'd be another, I'd lose my remaining faith in human nature. Maybe I'll play. But Rosalind wasn't the only girl in the wide world that could have held me. Well, yawned Tom. I played confident a good hour by the clock. Still, I'm glad to see you're beginning to have violent views again on something. I am, agreed Amory reluctantly, yet when I see a happy family it makes me sick at my stomach. Happy families try to make people feel that way, said Tom cynically. Tom the censor. There were days when Amory listened. These were when Tom, wreathed in smoke, indulged in the slaughter of American literature. Words failed him. Fifty thousand dollars a year, he would cry. My God, look at them! Look at them! Edna Furber, Gouverneur Morris, Fanny Hurst, Mary Robert's Reinhardt. Not producing among them one story or novel that will last ten years. This man Cobb. I don't think he's either clever or amusing. And what's more, I don't think very many people do except the editors. He's just groggy with advertising. And O. Harold Bell Wright, O. Zane Gray. They try. No, they don't even try. Some of them can write, but they won't sit down and do one honest novel. Most of them can't write, I'll admit. I believe Rupert Hughes tries to give a real comprehensive picture of American life, but his style and perspective are barbarous. Ernest Poole and Dorothy Canfield try, but they're hindered by their absolute lack of any sense of humor. But at least they crowd their work instead of spreading it thin. Every author ought to write every book as if he were going to be beheaded the day he finished it. Is that double-untaught? Don't slow me up. Now there's a few of them that seem to have some cultural background, some intelligence, and a good deal of literary felicity, but they just simply won't write honestly. They'd all claim there was no public for a good stuff. Then why the devil is it that Wells, Conrad, Galsworthy, Shaw, Bennett, and the rest depend on America for over half their sales? How does little Tommy like the poets? Tom was overcome. He dropped his arms until they swung loosely beside the chair and emitted faint grunts. I'm writing a satire on them now, calling it Boston Bards and Hearst Reviewers. Let's hear it, said Amory eagerly. I've only got the last few lines done. That's very modern. Let's hear them if they're funny. Tom produced a folded paper from his pocket and read aloud, pausing at intervals so that Amory could see that it was free verse. So Walter Ehrensburg, Alfred Cremborg, Carl Sandberg, Louis Untermeier, Eunice Titans, Clara Schanafelt, James Oppenheim, Maxwell Bodenheim, Richard Glenser, Charmel Iris, Conrad Aiken. I place your names here so that you may live if only as names, sinuous, mauve-colored names, in the juvenileia of my collected editions. Amory roared. You win the iron pansy. I'll buy you a meal on the arrogance of the last two lines. Amory did not entirely agree with Tom's sweeping damnation of American novelist and poets. He enjoyed both Vachal Lindsay and Booth Tarkington and admired the conscientious, if slender, artistry of Eggerly Masters. What I hate is this idiotic drivel about, I am God. I am man. I ride the winds. I look through the smoke. I am the life-sense. It's ghastly. And I wish American novelists would give up trying to make business romantically interesting. Nobody wants to read about it, unless it's crooked business. If it was an entertaining subject, they'd buy the life of James J. Hill and not one of these long office tragedies that harp along on the significance of smoke. And gloom, said Tom. That's another favorite, though I'll admit the Russians have the monopoly. Our specialty is stories about little girls who break their spines and get adopted by grouchy old men because they smile so much. You'd think we were a race of cheerful cripples and that the common end of the Russian peasant was suicide. Six o'clock, said Amory, glancing at his wristwatch. I'll buy you a great big dinner on the strength of the juvenileia of your collected additions. Looking backward. July swelled out with the last hot week, and Amory and another surge of unrest realized that it was just five months since he and Rosalind had met. Yet it was already hard for him to visualize the heart-hole boy who had stepped off the transport, passionately desiring the adventure of life. One night while the heat, overpowering and innervating, poured into the windows of his room, he struggled for several hours in a vague effort to immortalize the poignancy of that time. The February streets, wind-washed by night, blow full of strange half-interminute dams, bearing on wasted walks and shining sight, wet snow, plashed into gleams under the lamps, like golden oil from some divine machine in an hour of thaw and stars. Strange dams, full of the eyes of many men, crowded with life born in upon a lull. Oh, I was young, for I could turn again to you, most finite and most beautiful, and taste the stuff of half-remembered dreams, sweet and new, on your mouth. There was a tanging in the midnight air, silence was dead and sound not yet awoken, life cracked like ice. One brilliant note in there, radiant and pale, you stood and spring had broken. The icicles were short upon the roofs and the changeling city swooned. Our thoughts were frosty mist along the eaves, our two ghosts kissed high on the long mazed wires, eerie half- laughter echoes here and leaves only a fatuous sigh for young desires. Regret has followed after things she loved, leaving the great husk. Another ending. In mid-August came a letter from Monsignor Darcy, who had evidently just stumbled on his address. My dear boy, your last letter was quite enough to make me worry about you. It was not a bit like yourself. Reading between the lines I should imagine that your engagement to this girl is making you rather unhappy, and I say you have lost all the feeling of romance that you had before the war. You make a great mistake if you think you can be a romantic without religion. Sometimes I think that with both of us, the secret of success, when we find it, is the mystical element in us. Something flows into us that enlarges our personalities, and when it ebbs out, our personalities shrink. I should call your last two letters rather shriveled. Beware of losing yourself in the personality of another being, man or woman. His Eminence Cardinal O'Neill and the Bishop of Boston are staying with me at present, so it is hard for me to get a moment to write, but I wish you would come up here later if only for a weekend. I go to Washington this week. What I shall do in the future is hanging in the balance. Absolutely between ourselves. I should not be surprised to see the red hat of a cardinal descend upon my unworthy head within the next eight months. In any event, I should like to have a house in New York or Washington where you could drop in for weekends. Amory, I'm very glad we're both alive. This war could easily have been the end of a brilliant family. But in regard to matrimony, you are now at the most dangerous period of your life. You might marry in haste and repent at leisure, but I think you won't. From what you write me about the present calamitous state of your finances, what you want is naturally impossible. However, if I judge you by the means I usually choose, I should say that there will be something of an emotional crisis within the next year. Do write me. I feel annoyingly out of date on you. With greatest affection, Thayer Darcy. Within a week after the receipt of this letter their little household fell precipitously to pieces. The immediate cause was the serious and probably chronic illness of Tom's mother. So they stored the furniture, gave instructions to sublet, and shook hands gloomily at the Pennsylvania station. Amory and Tom seemed always to be saying good-bye. Feeling very much alone, Amory yielded to an impulse and set off southward, intending to join Monsignor and Washington. They missed connections by two hours, and deciding to spend a few days with an ancient remember-dunkel. Amory journeyed up through the luxuriant fields of Maryland into Ramley County. But instead of two days, his stay lasted from mid-August nearly through September, for a Maryland he met Elinor. For years afterward when Amory thought of Elinor he seemed still to hear the wind sobbing around him and sending little chills into the places beside his heart. The night when they rode up the slope and watched the cold moon float through the clouds he lost a further part of him that nothing could restore. And when he lost it he lost also the power of regretting it. Elinor was, say, the last time that evil crept close to Amory under the mask of beauty, the last weird mystery that held him with wild fascination and pounded his soul to flakes. With her his imagination ran riot, and that is why they rode to the highest hill and watched an evil moon ride high, for they knew then that they could see the devil in each other. But Elinor, did Amory dream her? Afterward their ghosts played, yet both of them hoped from their souls never to meet. Was it the infinite sadness of her eyes that drew him or the mirror of himself that he found in the gorgeous clarity of her mind? She will have no other adventure like Amory, and if she reads this she will say, and Amory will have no other adventure like me. Nor will she sigh any more than he would sigh. Elinor tried to put it on paper once. The fading things we only know will have forgotten. Put away. Desires that melted with the snow, and dreams begotten. This today, the sudden dawns we laugh to greet, that all could see, that none could share, will be but dawns, and if we meet we shall not care. Dear, not one tear will rise for this, a little while hence. No regret will stir for a remembered kiss, not even silence. When we've met we'll give old ghosts a waste to roam, or stir the surface of the sea, if gray shapes drift beneath the foam, we shall not see. They quarreled dangerously because Amory maintained that C, S-E-A, and C, S-E-E couldn't possibly be used as a rhyme, and then Elinor had part of another verse that she couldn't find a beginning for. But wisdom passes, still the years will feed us wisdom. Age will go back to the old, for all our tears we shall not know. Elinor hated Marilyn passionately. She belonged to the oldest of the old families of Rameley County, and lived in a big, gloomy house with her grandfather. She had been born and brought up in France. I see I'm starting wrong. Let me begin again. Amory was bored as he usually was in the country. He used to go for far walks by himself, and wander along reciting Yucca Lumet to the cornfields, and congratulating Poe for drinking himself to death in that atmosphere of smiling complacency. One afternoon he had strolled for several miles along a road that was new to him, and then threw a wood on bad advice from a colored woman, losing himself entirely. A passing storm decided to break out, and to his great impatience the sky grew black as pitch, and the rain began to splatter down through the trees, become suddenly furtive and ghostly. Thunder rolled with menacing crashes up the valley, and scattered through the woods in intermittent batteries. He stumbled blindly on, hunting for a way out, and finally, through webs of twisted branches, caught sight of a rift in the trees where the unbroken lightning showed open country. He rushed to the edge of the woods, and then hesitated whether or not to cross the fields, and try to reach the shelter of the little house, marked by a light far down the valley. It was only half past five, but he could see scarcely ten steps before him, except when the lightning made everything vivid and grotesque for great sweeps around. Suddenly a strange sound fell on his ears. It was a song in a low husky voice, a girl's voice, and whoever was singing was very close to him. A year before he might have laughed or trembled, but in his restless mood he only stood and listened while the words sank into his consciousness. Les sangles longues des violons de l'automne, bless mon coeur du longueur monotone. The lightning split the sky, but the song went on without a quaver. The girl was evidently in the field, and the voice seemed to come vaguely from a haystack about twenty feet in front of him. Then it ceased. Seized, and began again in a weird chant that soared and hung and fell and blended with the rain. Tout souffle compte et blem compte son heure. Je me surviens des jours anciens et je pleurs. Who the devil is there in Ramley County? Mother Damary allowed. Who would deliver for Lane in an extemporaneous tune to a soaking haystack? Somebody's there! cried the voice unalarmed. Who are you? Manfred? St. Christopher or Queen Victoria? I'm Don Juan. Amry shouted on impulse, raising his voice above the noise of the rain and the wind. A delighted shriek came from the haystack. I know who you are. You're the blonde boy that likes you la lumi. I recognize your voice. How do I get up? He cried from the foot of the haystack, wither he had arrived, dripping wet. A head appeared over the edge. It was so dark that Amry could just make out a patch of damp hair and two eyes that gleamed like a cat's. Run back, came the voice, and jump, and I'll catch your hand. No, not there, on the other side. He followed directions, and as he sprawled up the side, knee deep in hay, a small white hand reached out, gripped his and helped him on to the top. Here you are, Juan, cried she of the damp hair. Do you mind if I drop the dawn? You've got a thumb like mine, he exclaimed. And you're holding my hand, which is dangerous without seeing my face. He dropped it quickly. As if an answer to his prayers came a flash of lightning, and he looked eagerly at her, who stood beside him on the soggy haystack, ten feet above the ground. But she had covered her face, and he saw nothing but a slender figure, dark, damp bobbed hair, and the small white hands were the thumbs that bent back like his. Sit down, she suggested politely, as the dark clothes did on them. If you sit opposite me in this hollow, you can have half of the raincoat, which I was using as a waterproof tent until you so rudely interrupted me. I was asked, Amory said joyfully. You asked me, you know you did. Don Juan always manages that, she said, laughing. But I shun't call you that any more, because you've got reddish hair. Instead, you can recite Yululume and Anbi Saiki, your soul. Amory flushed, happily invisible, under the curtain of wind and rain. They were sitting opposite each other in a slight hollow in the hay, with the raincoat spread over most of them, and the rain doing for the rest. Amory was trying desperately to see Saiki, but the lightning refused to flash again, and he waited impatiently. Good Lord! Supposing she wasn't beautiful! Supposing she was forty and pedantic! heavens! Suppose, only suppose, she was mad! But he knew the last was unworthy. Here had Providence sent a girl to amuse him just as it sent Benevuto Selini men to murder, and he was wondering if she was mad just because she exactly filled his mood. I'm not, she said. Not what? Not mad. I didn't think you were mad when I first saw you, so it isn't fair that you should think so of me. How on earth? As long as they knew each other, Eleanor and Amory could be on a subject, and stop talking with the definite thought of it in their heads, yet ten minutes later speak aloud and find that their minds had followed the same channels, and led them each to a parallel idea, an idea that others would have found absolutely unconnected with the first. Tell me, he demanded, leaning forward eagerly. How do you know about Yululumi? How did you know the color of my hair? What's your name? What are you doing here? Tell me all at once! Suddenly the lightning flashed in with a leap of overreaching light, and he saw Eleanor, and looked for the first time into those eyes of hers. Oh, she was magnificent. Pale skin, the color of marble in starlight, slender brows, and eyes that glittered green as emeralds in the blinding glare. She was a witch of perhaps nineteen, he judged, alert and dreamy and with the tell-tale white line over her upper lip that was a weakness and a delight. He sank back with a gasp against the wall of hay. Now you've seen me, she said calmly, and I suppose you're about to say that my green eyes are burning into your brain. What color is your hair? He asked intently. It's bobbed, isn't it? Yes, it's bobbed. I don't know what color it is, she answered, musing. So many men have asked me. It's medium, I suppose. No one ever looks long at my hair. I've got beautiful eyes, though, haven't I? I don't care what you say, I have beautiful eyes. Answer my question, Madeline. Don't remember them all. Besides, my name isn't Madeline, it's Eleanor. I might have guessed it. You look like Eleanor. You have that Eleanor look. You know what I mean. There was a silence as they listened to the rain. It's going down my neck, fellow lunatic, she offered finally. Answer my questions. Well, name of savage Eleanor. Live in big old house, mild down road, nearest living relation to be notified. Grandfather, ramily savage, height, five feet four inches, number on watch case, 3077W, nose, delicate aquiline, temperament, uncanny. And me, Amory interrupted, where did you see me? Oh, you're one of those men, she answered haughtily. Must lug old self into conversation. Well, my boy, I was behind a hedge, sunning myself one day last week, and along comes a man saying in a pleasant conceited way of talking. And now where the night was senescent, says he, and the star-dials pointed to mourn. At the end of the path a lequessent, says he, and nebulous luster was born. So I poked my eyes up over the hedge, but you had started to run, for some unknown reason, and so I saw but the back of your beautiful head. Oh, says I, there's a man for whom many of us might sigh. And I continued in my best Irish. All right, Amory interrupted, now go back to yourself. Well, I will. I'm one of those people who go through the world giving other people thrills, but getting few myself, except those I read into men on such nights as these. I have the social courage to go on the stage, but not the energy. I haven't the patience to write books, and I never met a man I'd marry. However, I'm only eighteen. The storm was dying down softly, and only the wind kept up its ghostly surge, and made the stack lean and gravely settle from side to side. Amory was in a trance. He felt that every moment was precious. He had never met a girl like this before. She would never seem quite the same again. He didn't at all feel like a character in a play, the appropriate feeling in an unconventional situation. Instead he had a sense of coming home. I have just made a great decision, said Eleanor after another pause, and that is why I'm here, to answer another of your questions. I have just decided that I don't believe in immortality. Really, how banal! Frightfully so, she answered, but depressing with a stale, sickly depression nevertheless. I came out here to get wet, like a wet hen. Wet hens always have a great clarity of mind, she concluded. Go on, Amory said politely. Well, I'm not afraid of the dark, so I put on my slicker and rubber boots and came out. You see, I was always afraid before, to say I didn't believe in God, because the lightning might strike me. But here I am, and it hasn't, of course, but the main point is that this time I wasn't any more afraid of it than I had been when I was a Christian scientist, like I was last year. So now I know I'm a materialist, and I was fraternizing with the hay when you came out and stood by the woods scared to death. Why, you little wretch! cried Amory indignantly. Scared of what? Yourself! she shouted, and he jumped. She clapped her hands and laughed. See, see, conscience, kid it like me! Ellen, her savage materialist, no jumping, no starting, come early! But I have to have a soul, he objected. I can't be rational, and I won't be molecular. She leaned toward him, her burning eyes never leaving his own, and whispered with a sort of romantic finality. I thought so, Juan. I feared so. You're sentimental. You're not like me. I'm a romantic little materialist. I'm not sentimental. I'm as romantic as you are. The idea, you know, is that the sentimental person thinks things will last. The romantic person has a desperate confidence that they won't. This was an ancient distinction of Amory's. Epigrams. I'm going home. She said sadly. Let's get off the haystack and walk to the crossroads. They slowly descended from their perch. She would not let him help her down, and motioning him away, arrived in a graceful lump in the soft mud, where she sat for an instant, laughing at herself. Then she jumped to her feet and slipped her hand into his, and they tiptoed across the fields, jumping and swinging from dry spot to dry spot. A transcendent delight seemed to sparkle in every pool of water, for the moon had risen, and the storm had scurried away into western Maryland. When Eleanor's arm touched his, he felt his hands grow cold with deadly fear, lest he should lose the shadow brush with which his imagination was painting wonders of her. He watched her from the corner of his eyes, as ever he did when he walked with her. She was a feast and a folly, and he wished it had been his destiny to sit forever on a haystack and see life through her green eyes. His paganism soared that night, and when she faded out like a gray ghost down the road, a deep singing came out of the fields and filled his way homeward. All night the summer moths flitted in and out of Amory's window. All night large looming sounds swayed in mystic reverie through the silver grain, and he lay awake in the clear darkness. September Amory selected a blade of grass and nibbled at it scientifically. I never fall in love in August or September, he proffered. When then? Christmas or Easter, I'm a liturgist. Easter, she turned up her nose. Huh! Spring in corsets. Easter wood bore spring, wouldn't she? Easter has her hair braided, wears a tailored suit. Bind on thy sandals, O thou most fleet, over the splendour and speed of thy feet," quoted Eleanor softly, and then added, I suppose Halloween is a better day for autumn than Thanksgiving. Much better, and Christmas Eve does very well for winter, but summer— Summer has no day, she said. We can't possibly have a summer love. So many people have tried that their names become proverbial. Summer is only the unfulfilled promise of spring, a charlatan in place of the warm balmy nights I dream of in April. It's a sad season of life without growth. It has no day. Fourth of July, Amory suggested facetiously. Don't be funny, she said, raking him with her eyes. Well, what could fulfil the promise of spring? She thought a moment. Oh, I suppose heaven would if there was one, she said finally. A sort of pagan heaven, you ought to be a materialist, she continued irrelevantly. Why? Because you look a good deal like the pictures of Rupert Brooke. To some extent Amory tried to play Rupert Brooke as long as he knew Eleanor. What he said, his attitude toward life, toward her, toward himself, were all reflexes of the dead Englishman's literary moods. Often she sat in the grass, a lazy wind playing with her short hair, her voice husky as she ran up and down the scale from Grant Chester to Waikiki. There was something most passionate in Eleanor's reading aloud. They seemed nearer, not only mentally but physically, when they read. Then when she was in his arms, and this was often, for they fell half into love almost from the first. Yet was Amory capable of love now? He could as always run through the emotions in a half hour, but even while they reveled in their imaginations, he knew that neither of them could care as he had cared once before. I suppose that was why they turned to Brooke and Swinbur and Shelley. Their chance was to make everything fine and finished and rich and imaginative. They must bend tiny golden tentacles from his imagination to hers that would take the place of the great deep love that was never so near, yet never so much of a dream. One poem they read over and over, Swinburne's Triumph of Time, and four lines of it rang in his memory afterward on warm nights when he saw the fireflies among dusky tree-trunks and heard the low drone of many frogs. Then Eleanor seemed to come out of the night and stand by him, and he heard her throaty voice, with its tone of a fleecy-headed drum repeating, Is it worth a tear or is it worth an hour to think of things that are well outworn, a fruitless husk and fugitive flower, the dream foregone, and the deed foreborn? They were formally introduced two days later, and his aunt told him her history. The Ramleys were two, old Mr. Ramley and his granddaughter Eleanor. She had lived in France with a restless mother whom Emery imagined to have been very like his own, on whose death she had come to America, to live in Maryland. She had gone to Baltimore first to stay with a bachelor uncle, and there she insisted on being a debutante at the age of seventeen. She had a wild winter and arrived in the country in March, having quarreled frantically with all her Baltimore relatives, and shocked them into fiery protest. A rather fast crowd had come out, who drank cocktails and limousines, and were promiscuously condescending and patronizing toward older people, and Eleanor with an esprit that hinted strongly of the boulevards, led many innocents still redolent of St. Timothy's and Farmington into paths of bohemian naughtiness. When the story came to her uncle, a forgetful cavalier of a more hypocritical era, there was a scene from which Eleanor emerged subdued, but rebellious and 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 to rest herself, but that was later. Often they swam, and as Emery 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 anyone possibly think or worry, or do anything except splash and dive and lull 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 Emery resented that life had changed from an even progress along a road stretching ever in sight, with a 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 scrapbook 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 born 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. That his sparing 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 and curious, elfin love moods. Then they turned out of the moonlight into the trellest 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, seems 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. And of this part of Chapter 3, Chapter 3, Part 2 of This Side of Paradise. This recording is by Mark Smith of Simpsonville, South Carolina. This Side of Paradise by F. Scott Fitzgerald Book 2, Chapter 3, Part 2, 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 it relevantly, and leaning over she padded him lazily with her riding-crop. You can leave your old plug in our stable and I'll send him over tomorrow. 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! Oh, rather don't! Why are all the exciting things so uncomfortable, like fighting and exploring and skiing in Canada? By the way, we're going to ride up Harper's Hill. I think that comes in our program 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! Someone's coming along the road. Let's go! 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 man-fred, build herself intellectual and imaginative pyramids while she reveled in the artificialities of the temperamental teens, and they wrote poetry at the dinner table. When Vanity kissed Vanity a hundred happy dunes ago, he pondered o'er her breathlessly, and, that all men might ever know, he rhymed her eyes with life and death. Through 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 ladies should live, and now we have no real interest in her. The irony of it is that if he had cared more for the palm 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 the, 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, tum-tump-tump-a-tump. Have you ever been feverish and had all noises divide into tum-tump-tump, until you could swear eternity was divisible into so many tumps? That's the way I feel. Old horses go tum-tump. I guess that's the only thing that separates horses and clocks from us. Human beings can't go tum-tump-tump without going crazy. The breeze freshened, and Eleanor pulled her cape around her and shivered. Are you very cold? asked Emery. 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 Emery 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 hip-ton-froid in all that, but it's rotten that every bit of real love in the world is ninety-nine percent passion and one little soup-son 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, everyone's got to have some cloak to throw around it. The mediocre intellects, Plato's second class, used 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 leaned toward her in the 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 are the maxims of Confucius. Amri looked up, taken rather 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 repented with gabble-gabble about the sixth and ninth commandments. It's just all cloaks, sentiment, and spiritual rouge and panaceas. I have to tell you that 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, Amri 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 deathbed. Eleanor drew her horse up sharply, and he reigned 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 clanger. 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 winny. 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 on to 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 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 lill to the water, lisping its music and bearing a burden of light, bosoming day as a laughing and radiant daughter, here we may whisper unheard, on afraid of the night. Walking alone, was it splendor or what we were bound with, deep in the time when summer lets down our hair? Shadows we loved in 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 shattered with penciled trees. Ghosts of the stars came by who had sought for glory, whispered to us of peace in the plain of 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 of the light is but sun and the little strings 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 blade? What leered out of the dark in the ghostly clover? God, too 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. Earthbore on the tireless is stretched by the water, quite weary, close to this ununderstandable changeling that's I. Fear is an echo we trace 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 the light of the moon. A poem Amry sent to Elinor 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 grey-blown cloud scurries and lifts above, slides on the sun and flutters there to waft her, sisters on, the shadow of a dove, fails on the coat, 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. Watch for the mist and the blacker rain, heavier winds that stir the veil of fate, happier winds that pile her hair again. They tear me, teach me, stir 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 had met before, wraithlike 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 one with all old hours, whispers will creep into the growing dark, tumult will die over the trees. Now night, tears from her wedded breast, the splattered blouse of day, glides down the dreaming hills, tear bright, to cover with their 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. End of Chapter 3 Book 2 Chapter 4 of This Side of Paradise This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. This recording is by Mark Smith of Simpsonville, South Carolina. This Side of Paradise by F. Scott Fitzgerald Book 2 Chapter 4 The Supercilius Sacrifice Atlantic City Amory paced the boardwalk 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 plowing the water world under raven-figured flags. Of the British dreadnaughts, gray bulwarks of civilization steaming up through the fog of one dark July into the North Sea. Well, Amory blane! Amory looked down into the street below. A low racing car had drawn to a stop on a familiar, cheerful face protruded from the driver's seat. Come on down, goofer! 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. Blane, this is Miss Watterson, Miss Wayne, and Mr. Tully. How do you 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 are 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 sort of 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 tonight, 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 Renear, 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 boardwalk 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 listnesses of his dissolution. 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 loan were left of all his love for Roseland. These remained to him as payment for the loss of his youth, bitter calamel 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. O staunch old heart who toiled so long for me, I have wasted 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. Roseland, Roseland! 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 Alex's voice. Jill, do you hear me? Yes. Breathe 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. Emery threw off the blankets and moved close to the bathroom door. My God! Claimed the girl's voice again. You'll have to let them in. Shhh! Suddenly a steady, insistent knocking began at Emery's hall door, and simultaneously out of the bathroom came Alec, followed by the vermilion-lipped girl. They were both clad in pajamas. Emery, an anxious whisper. What's the trouble? It's house detectives. My God, Emery! They're just looking for a test case. Well, better let the men. You don't understand. They can get me under the man-act. The girl followed him slowly, a rather miserable, pathetic figure in the darkness. Emery 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 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 his voice ceased, Emery 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 has a moon-beam. Tainted his 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 Emery. 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 Emery. 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 and essential luxury, caring 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. Emery knew that afterward Alec would secretly hate him for having done so much for him. All this was flung before Emery like an open 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 Emery, would be somehow the way God would talk to me. Emery felt a sudden surge of joy and then like a face and 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 Emery 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 Emery's. Alec, you're going to lie down here. If anyone 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 Emery 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 Joe 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. Emery laughed. Well? The leader of the trio nodded authoritatively at a burly man in a Czech suit. All right, Olson. I got you, Mr. Ome, 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 Emery contemptuously. Didn't you ever hear of the man-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 Emery, but now gave him up. Well? said Emery, 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 Emery slipped into Alex's BVDs, 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 Emery 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 Emery curiously. Night clerk saw you go upstairs with this woman. Emery nodded. Jill reappeared from the bathroom, completely if rather untitledly arrayed. Now, then, began Olson, producing a notebook. I want your real names. No damn John Smith or Mary Brown. Wait a minute, sent Emery quietly. Just dropped that big bully stuff. We merely got caught. That's all. Olson glared at him. Name, he snapped. Emery gave his name a New York address. Hand the lady. Miss Jill? Say, said 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 Emery at Olson. An instant's pause. Stella Robbins, she faltered finally. General Delivery, Rugway, New Hampshire. Olson snapped his notebook 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 bringing a girl from one state to another for immoral purposes. 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 Emery. 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 arrangement with the newspapers so that you get a little free publicity. Not the name of the hotel, but just a line saying that you had a little trouble in Atlantic City. See? I see. You're getting off light. Damn light, but... Come on, said Emery briskly. Let's get out of here. We don't need a valedictory. Olson walked through the bathroom and took a cursory glance at Alex still form. Then he extinguished the lights and motioned them to follow him. As they walked into the elevator, Emery 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 mourning. 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. Goodbye, said Olson. He reached in his pocket suggestively, but Emery 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 Emery critically, and then as an afterthought. 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 set 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 spirit seemed to have gone faster than the scattering night. Let me tell you, she said emphatically, when you want to stage that sort of 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's sort of crazy you've taken all that blame. Is he pretty important? Kind of more important than you are? Emery laughed. That remains to be seen, he answered. That's the question. The collapse of several pillars. Two days later, back in New York, Emery found in a newspaper what he had been searching for—a dozen lines which announced to whom it might concern that Mr. Emery Blaine, who gave his address as, etc., had been requested to leave his hotel in Atlantic City because of entertaining in his room a lady not his 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 somber luxury of wanting her, not this Rosalind, harder, older, nor any beaten, broken woman that his imagination brought to the door of his forties. Emery had wanted her youth, the fresh radiance of her mind and body, the stuff that she was selling now wants him 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 his 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. End of chapter. Book II, Chapter V of This Side of Paradise This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. This recording is by Mark Smith of Simpsonville, South Carolina. This Side of Paradise by F. Scott Fitzgerald. Book II, Chapter V The Egotist Becomes a Personage A fathom deep in sleep I lie, with old desires restrained before, to clamor lifeward with a cry as dark flies out the graying door. And so in quest of creeds to share I seek assertive day again, but old monotony is there, endless avenues of rain. Oh, might I rise again, might I throw off the heat of that old wine, see the new morning mass the sky with fairy towers, line on line, find each mirage in the high air, a symbol, not a dream again. But old monotony is there, endless avenues of rain. Under the glass portcullis of a theater, Amry 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 in division. 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 ponded with that ancient fence the night. The silence of the theater 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 sexuousness 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 oil-skinned 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 boars who grab your arm with another story, the querulous worry as to whether someone 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 fantasmagoria 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 wallpapers were heavy, reiterated sunflowers on green and yellow backgrounds, where there were tin bathtubs and gloomy hallways and verdurless, unnameable spaces in back of the buildings, where even love, dressed as seduction, assorted 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 and velloping 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 when there were only men or else only women. It was when they were vitally herded that it all seemed so rotten. It was some shame that women gave off it 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 battlefield he had seen, harder to contemplate than any actual hardship, molded of mire and sweat and danger. It was an atmosphere where in 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 everyone in the car a momentary glow. I detest poor people, thought Emery 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 Emery, what he said was, My God, aren't people horrible. Never before in his life had Emery considered poor people. He thought cynically how completely he was lacking in all human sympathy. Oh, Henry had found in these people romance, pathos, love, hate. Emery 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, un-moral. 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 autobus. Butting as 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. Question. You have the Lake Geneva estate? Answer. But I intend to keep it. Question. Can you live? Answer. 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. Question. Be definite. Answer. I don't know what I'll do, nor have I much curiosity. Tomorrow I'm going to leave New York for good. It's a bad town unless you're on top of it. Question. Do you want a lot of money? Answer. No, I'm merely afraid of being poor. Question. Very afraid? Answer. Just passively afraid. Question. Where are you drifting? Answer. Don't ask me. Question. Don't you care? Answer. Rather, I don't want to commit moral suicide. Question. Have you no interest left? Answer. 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. Question. An interesting idea. Answer. That's why a good man going wrong attracts people. They stand around and literally warm themselves at the calories of virtue he gives off. Sarah makes an unsophisticated remark in the face's 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. Question. All your calories gone? Answer. All of them. I'm beginning to warm myself at other people's virtue. Question. Are you corrupt? Answer. I think so. I'm not sure. I'm not sure about good and evil at all anymore. Question. Is that a bad sign in itself? Answer. Not necessarily. Question. What would be the test of corruption? Answer. Becoming really insincere, calling myself not such a bad fellow, thinking I regretted my lost youth when I only envied 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. Question. 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. Question. Are her maintenance more than yours? Question. Where are your résults? Answer. location. Question. Where is your economic companies? Answer. Question. Man assignment. Maybe her work in her daylight would be somehow against the defguee. her interests? 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? 120th Street? That must have been 112th back there. 102 instead of 127. Rosalind, not like Beatrice. Eleanor, like Beatrice, only wilder and brainier. Apartments along here expensive. Probably 150 a month. Maybe 200. Uncle had only paid hundred a month for a whole great big house in Minneapolis. Question, were the stairs on the left or right as you came in? Anyway, in 12 Univay they were straight back into 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. $24 meant 480 donuts. He could live on it three months and sleep in the park. Wonder where Jill was. Jill Bain, feign, sane. What the devil. Neck hurts, darned uncomfortable seat. No desire to sleep with Jill. What could Alex see in her? Alex had a coarse taste in women. Owned taste the best. Isabel, 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 Amri had finally caught sight of one, 127th 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 lunges, canoes, row-boats, and cat-boats. 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 in paint and the scarcely distinguishable flat odor of the Hudson, a man approached through the heavy gloom. �Hello?� said Amri. �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. Amri 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, Amri 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. Only more than any concrete vice or failing Amri despised his own personality. He loathed knowing that tomorrow 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, wandering 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. Emery smiled a bit. You're too much wrapped up in yourself, he heard someone 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 his cigarette, while he listened to guitars strumming melancholy undertones to an age-old dirge of castile and an olive-skinned, carbon-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 sense, 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 odours, where lust could be a mood 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 a queer feet in Phoebe's room had diminished to the aura over Jill. His instincts perceived the fetidness of poverty, but no longer fared it out the deeper evils in pride and sensuality. There were no more wise men, there were no more heroes. Burn holiday was sunk from sight as though he had never lived. Monsignor was dead. Amri 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 Brooks, who had defied life from mountaintops, were at the end but flanners 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 Wands, 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 marvelously incoherent and inarticulate, he had thought to perpetuate in terms of experience. He had become merely consecrations to their own posterity. Isabel, 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. Amri based his loss of faith and 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 Bernhardy, Bonar Law and Bethman Holvig were mutual heirs of progress if only in agreeing against the ducking of witches, waving the artitheses 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 advisor to presidents, yet Amri knew 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. Amri had seen Monsignor go to the houses of stolid Philistines, read popular novels furiously, integrate himself in routine, to escape from that horror. And this priest, a little wiser, somewhat purer, had been, Amri knew, not essentially older than he. Amri was alone. He had escaped from a small enclosure into a great labyrinth. He was where girthy was when he began Faust. He was where Conrad was when he wrote, Alma Years Folly. Amri 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 Welles and Plato, who had, half unconsciously, a strange hidden orthodoxy, who would accept for themselves only what could be accepted for all men, incurable romantises, 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. Amri 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 Hoismans and Newman, Shah had sugar-coated Nietzsche and Ibsen and Schopenhauer. The man in the street heard the conclusions of dead genius through someone else's clever paradoxes and didactic epigrams. Life was a damned muddle. A football game with everyone offside and the referee gotten rid of. Everyone 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 fought it. The invisible king, the Elan Vitaal, the principle of evolution, writing a book, starting a war, founding a school. Amri, 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 in his own temperament of the balm of love and children, preserved to help him building up the living consciousness of the race. With 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 lamp still shining like burning eyes in a face white from a night's carous. A melancholy