CHAPTER 2. Spires and Gargoyles 12 page

ROSALIND: No.

AMORY: Don't you _want_ to kiss me?

ROSALIND: To-night I want you to love me calmly and coolly.

AMORY: The beginning of the end.

ROSALIND: (With a burst of insight) Amory, you're young. I'm young.

People excuse us now for our poses and vanities, for treating people

like Sancho and yet getting away with it. They excuse us now. But you've

got a lot of knocks coming to you--

AMORY: And you're afraid to take them with me.

ROSALIND: No, not that. There was a poem I read somewhere--you'll say

Ella Wheeler Wilcox and laugh--but listen:

"For this is wisdom--to love and live,

To take what fate or the gods may give,

To ask no question, to make no prayer,

To kiss the lips and caress the hair,

Speed passion's ebb as we greet its flow,

To have and to hold, and, in time--let go."

AMORY: But we haven't had.

ROSALIND: Amory, I'm yours--you know it. There have been times in the

last month I'd have been completely yours if you'd said so. But I can't

marry you and ruin both our lives.

AMORY: We've got to take our chance for happiness.

ROSALIND: Dawson says I'd learn to love him.

(AMORY with his head sunk in his hands does not move. The life seems

suddenly gone out of him.)

ROSALIND: Lover! Lover! I can't do with you, and I can't imagine life

without you.

AMORY: Rosalind, we're on each other's nerves. It's just that we're both

high-strung, and this week--

(His voice is curiously old. She crosses to him and taking his face in

her hands, kisses him.)

ROSALIND: I can't, Amory. I can't be shut away from the trees and

flowers, cooped up in a little flat, waiting for you. You'd hate me in a

narrow atmosphere. I'd make you hate me.

(Again she is blinded by sudden uncontrolled tears.)

AMORY: Rosalind--

ROSALIND: Oh, darling, go--Don't make it harder! I can't stand it--

AMORY: (His face drawn, his voice strained) Do you know what you're

saying? Do you mean forever?

(There is a difference somehow in the quality of their suffering.)

ROSALIND: Can't you see--

AMORY: I'm afraid I can't if you love me. You're afraid of taking two

years' knocks with me.

ROSALIND: I wouldn't be the Rosalind you love.

AMORY: (A little hysterically) I can't give you up! I can't, that's all!

I've got to have you!

ROSALIND: (A hard note in her voice) You're being a baby now.

AMORY: (Wildly) I don't care! You're spoiling our lives!

ROSALIND: I'm doing the wise thing, the only thing.

AMORY: Are you going to marry Dawson Ryder?

ROSALIND: Oh, don't ask me. You know I'm old in some ways--in

others--well, I'm just a little girl. I like sunshine and pretty things

and cheerfulness--and I dread responsibility. I don't want to think

about pots and kitchens and brooms. I want to worry whether my legs will

get slick and brown when I swim in the summer.

AMORY: And you love me.

ROSALIND: That's just why it has to end. Drifting hurts too much. We

can't have any more scenes like this.

(She draws his ring from her finger and hands it to him. Their eyes

blind again with tears.)

AMORY: (His lips against her wet cheek) Don't! Keep it, please--oh,

don't break my heart!

(She presses the ring softly into his hand.)

ROSALIND: (Brokenly) You'd better go.

AMORY: Good-by--

(She looks at him once more, with infinite longing, infinite sadness.)

ROSALIND: Don't ever forget me, Amory--

AMORY: Good-by--

(He goes to the door, fumbles for the knob, finds it--she sees him throw

back his head--and he is gone. Gone--she half starts from the lounge and

then sinks forward on her face into the pillows.)

ROSALIND: Oh, God, I want to die! (After a moment she rises and with

her eyes closed feels her way to the door. Then she turns and looks once

more at the room. Here they had sat and dreamed: that tray she had so

often filled with matches for him; that shade that they had discreetly

lowered one long Sunday afternoon. Misty-eyed she stands and remembers;

she speaks aloud.) Oh, Amory, what have I done to you?

(And deep under the aching sadness that will pass in time, Rosalind

feels that she has lost something, she knows not what, she knows not

why.)

CHAPTER 2. Experiments in Convalescence

The Knickerbocker Bar, beamed upon by Maxfield Parrish's jovial,

colorful "Old King Cole," was well crowded. Amory stopped in the

entrance and looked at his wrist-watch; he wanted particularly to know

the time, for something in his mind that catalogued and classified liked

to chip things off cleanly. Later it would satisfy him in a vague way to

be able to think "that thing ended at exactly twenty minutes after eight

on Thursday, June 10, 1919." This was allowing for the walk from

her house--a walk concerning which he had afterward not the faintest

recollection.

He was in rather grotesque condition: two days of worry and nervousness,

of sleepless nights, of untouched meals, culminating in the emotional

crisis and Rosalind's abrupt decision--the strain of it had drugged the

foreground of his mind into a merciful coma. As he fumbled clumsily with

the olives at the free-lunch table, a man approached and spoke to him,

and the olives dropped from his nervous hands.

"Well, Amory..."

It was some one he had known at Princeton; he had no idea of the name.

"Hello, old boy--" he heard himself saying.

"Name's Jim Wilson--you've forgotten."

"Sure, you bet, Jim. I remember."

"Going to reunion?"

"You know!" Simultaneously he realized that he was not going to reunion.

"Get overseas?"

Amory nodded, his eyes staring oddly. Stepping back to let some one

pass, he knocked the dish of olives to a crash on the floor.

"Too bad," he muttered. "Have a drink?"

Wilson, ponderously diplomatic, reached over and slapped him on the

back.

"You've had plenty, old boy."

Amory eyed him dumbly until Wilson grew embarrassed under the scrutiny.

"Plenty, hell!" said Amory finally. "I haven't had a drink to-day."

Wilson looked incredulous.

"Have a drink or not?" cried Amory rudely.

Together they sought the bar.

"Rye high."

"I'll just take a Bronx."

Wilson had another; Amory had several more. They decided to sit down.

At ten o'clock Wilson was displaced by Carling, class of '15. Amory, his

head spinning gorgeously, layer upon layer of soft satisfaction setting

over the bruised spots of his spirit, was discoursing volubly on the

war.

"'S a mental was'e," he insisted with owl-like wisdom. "Two years my

life spent inalleshual vacuity. Los' idealism, got be physcal anmal,"

he shook his fist expressively at Old King Cole, "got be Prussian 'bout

ev'thing, women 'specially. Use' be straight 'bout women college. Now

don'givadam." He expressed his lack of principle by sweeping a seltzer

bottle with a broad gesture to noisy extinction on the floor, but this

did not interrupt his speech. "Seek pleasure where find it for to-morrow

die. 'At's philos'phy for me now on."

Carling yawned, but Amory, waxing brilliant, continued:

"Use' wonder 'bout things--people satisfied compromise, fif'y-fif'y

att'tude on life. Now don' wonder, don' wonder--" He became so emphatic

in impressing on Carling the fact that he didn't wonder that he lost the

thread of his discourse and concluded by announcing to the bar at large

that he was a "physcal anmal."

"What are you celebrating, Amory?"

Amory leaned forward confidentially.

"Cel'brating blowmylife. Great moment blow my life. Can't tell you 'bout

it--"

He heard Carling addressing a remark to the bartender:

"Give him a bromo-seltzer."

Amory shook his head indignantly.

"None that stuff!"

"But listen, Amory, you're making yourself sick. You're white as a

ghost."

Amory considered the question. He tried to look at himself in the mirror

but even by squinting up one eye could only see as far as the row of

bottles behind the bar.

"Like som'n solid. We go get some--some salad."

He settled his coat with an attempt at nonchalance, but letting go of

the bar was too much for him, and he slumped against a chair.

"We'll go over to Shanley's," suggested Carling, offering an elbow.

With this assistance Amory managed to get his legs in motion enough to

propel him across Forty-second Street.

Shanley's was very dim. He was conscious that he was talking in a loud

voice, very succinctly and convincingly, he thought, about a desire

to crush people under his heel. He consumed three club sandwiches,

devouring each as though it were no larger than a chocolate-drop.

Then Rosalind began popping into his mind again, and he found his lips

forming her name over and over. Next he was sleepy, and he had a hazy,

listless sense of people in dress suits, probably waiters, gathering

around the table....

... He was in a room and Carling was saying something about a knot in

his shoe-lace.

"Nemmine," he managed to articulate drowsily. "Sleep in 'em...."

*****

STILL ALCOHOLIC

He awoke laughing and his eyes lazily roamed his surroundings, evidently

a bedroom and bath in a good hotel. His head was whirring and picture

after picture was forming and blurring and melting before his eyes, but

beyond the desire to laugh he had no entirely conscious reaction. He

reached for the 'phone beside his bed.

"Hello--what hotel is this--?

"Knickerbocker? All right, send up two rye high-balls--"

He lay for a moment and wondered idly whether they'd send up a bottle

or just two of those little glass containers. Then, with an effort, he

struggled out of bed and ambled into the bathroom.

When he emerged, rubbing himself lazily with a towel, he found the bar

boy with the drinks and had a sudden desire to kid him. On reflection he

decided that this would be undignified, so he waved him away.

As the new alcohol tumbled into his stomach and warmed him, the isolated

pictures began slowly to form a cinema reel of the day before. Again he

saw Rosalind curled weeping among the pillows, again he felt her tears

against his cheek. Her words began ringing in his ears: "Don't ever

forget me, Amory--don't ever forget me--"

"Hell!" he faltered aloud, and then he choked and collapsed on the

bed in a shaken spasm of grief. After a minute he opened his eyes and

regarded the ceiling.

"Damned fool!" he exclaimed in disgust, and with a voluminous sigh rose

and approached the bottle. After another glass he gave way loosely

to the luxury of tears. Purposely he called up into his mind little

incidents of the vanished spring, phrased to himself emotions that would

make him react even more strongly to sorrow.

"We were so happy," he intoned dramatically, "so very happy." Then he

gave way again and knelt beside the bed, his head half-buried in the

pillow.

"My own girl--my own--Oh--"

He clinched his teeth so that the tears streamed in a flood from his

eyes.

"Oh... my baby girl, all I had, all I wanted!... Oh, my girl, come back,

come back! I need you... need you... we're so pitiful ... just misery we

brought each other.... She'll be shut away from me.... I can't see her;

I can't be her friend. It's got to be that way--it's got to be--"

And then again:

"We've been so happy, so very happy...."

He rose to his feet and threw himself on the bed in an ecstasy of

sentiment, and then lay exhausted while he realized slowly that he had

been very drunk the night before, and that his head was spinning again

wildly. He laughed, rose, and crossed again to Lethe....

At noon he ran into a crowd in the Biltmore bar, and the riot began

again. He had a vague recollection afterward of discussing French poetry

with a British officer who was introduced to him as "Captain Corn, of

his Majesty's Foot," and he remembered attempting to recite "Clair de

Lune" at luncheon; then he slept in a big, soft chair until almost

five o'clock when another crowd found and woke him; there followed an

alcoholic dressing of several temperaments for the ordeal of dinner.

They selected theatre tickets at Tyson's for a play that had a

four-drink programme--a play with two monotonous voices, with turbid,

gloomy scenes, and lighting effects that were hard to follow when his

eyes behaved so amazingly. He imagined afterward that it must have been

"The Jest."...

... Then the Cocoanut Grove, where Amory slept again on a little balcony

outside. Out in Shanley's, Yonkers, he became almost logical, and by a

careful control of the number of high-balls he drank, grew quite lucid

and garrulous. He found that the party consisted of five men, two of

whom he knew slightly; he became righteous about paying his share of the

expense and insisted in a loud voice on arranging everything then and

there to the amusement of the tables around him....

Some one mentioned that a famous cabaret star was at the next table,

so Amory rose and, approaching gallantly, introduced himself... this

involved him in an argument, first with her escort and then with the

headwaiter--Amory's attitude being a lofty and exaggerated courtesy...

he consented, after being confronted with irrefutable logic, to being

led back to his own table.

"Decided to commit suicide," he announced suddenly.

"When? Next year?"

"Now. To-morrow morning. Going to take a room at the Commodore, get into

a hot bath and open a vein."

"He's getting morbid!"

"You need another rye, old boy!"

"We'll all talk it over to-morrow."

But Amory was not to be dissuaded, from argument at least.

"Did you ever get that way?" he demanded confidentially fortaccio.

"Sure!"

"Often?"

"My chronic state."

This provoked discussion. One man said that he got so depressed

sometimes that he seriously considered it. Another agreed that there was

nothing to live for. "Captain Corn," who had somehow rejoined the party,

said that in his opinion it was when one's health was bad that one felt

that way most. Amory's suggestion was that they should each order a

Bronx, mix broken glass in it, and drink it off. To his relief no one

applauded the idea, so having finished his high-ball, he balanced his

chin in his hand and his elbow on the table--a most delicate, scarcely

noticeable sleeping position, he assured himself--and went into a deep

stupor....

He was awakened by a woman clinging to him, a pretty woman, with brown,

disarranged hair and dark blue eyes.

"Take me home!" she cried.

"Hello!" said Amory, blinking.

"I like you," she announced tenderly.

"I like you too."

He noticed that there was a noisy man in the background and that one of

his party was arguing with him.

"Fella I was with's a damn fool," confided the blue-eyed woman. "I hate

him. I want to go home with you."

"You drunk?" queried Amory with intense wisdom.

She nodded coyly.

"Go home with him," he advised gravely. "He brought you."

At this point the noisy man in the background broke away from his

detainers and approached.

"Say!" he said fiercely. "I brought this girl out here and you're

butting in!"

Amory regarded him coldly, while the girl clung to him closer.

"You let go that girl!" cried the noisy man.

Amory tried to make his eyes threatening.

"You go to hell!" he directed finally, and turned his attention to the

girl.

"Love first sight," he suggested.

"I love you," she breathed and nestled close to him. She _did_ have

beautiful eyes.

Some one leaned over and spoke in Amory's ear.

"That's just Margaret Diamond. She's drunk and this fellow here brought

her. Better let her go."

"Let him take care of her, then!" shouted Amory furiously. "I'm no W. Y.

C. A. worker, am I?--am I?"

"Let her go!"

"It's _her_ hanging on, damn it! Let her hang!"

The crowd around the table thickened. For an instant a brawl threatened,

but a sleek waiter bent back Margaret Diamond's fingers until she

released her hold on Amory, whereupon she slapped the waiter furiously

in the face and flung her arms about her raging original escort.

"Oh, Lord!" cried Amory.

"Let's go!"

"Come on, the taxis are getting scarce!"

"Check, waiter."

"C'mon, Amory. Your romance is over."

Amory laughed.

"You don't know how true you spoke. No idea. 'At's the whole trouble."

*****

AMORY ON THE LABOR QUESTION

Two mornings later he knocked at the president's door at Bascome and

Barlow's advertising agency.

"Come in!"

Amory entered unsteadily.

"'Morning, Mr. Barlow."

Mr. Barlow brought his glasses to the inspection and set his mouth

slightly ajar that he might better listen.

"Well, Mr. Blaine. We haven't seen you for several days."

"No," said Amory. "I'm quitting."

"Well--well--this is--"

"I don't like it here."

"I'm sorry. I thought our relations had been quite--ah--pleasant. You

seemed to be a hard worker--a little inclined perhaps to write fancy

copy--"

"I just got tired of it," interrupted Amory rudely. "It didn't matter a

damn to me whether Harebell's flour was any better than any one else's.

In fact, I never ate any of it. So I got tired of telling people about

it--oh, I know I've been drinking--"

Mr. Barlow's face steeled by several ingots of expression.

"You asked for a position--"

Amory waved him to silence.

"And I think I was rottenly underpaid. Thirty-five dollars a week--less

than a good carpenter."

"You had just started. You'd never worked before," said Mr. Barlow

coolly.

"But it took about ten thousand dollars to educate me where I could

write your darned stuff for you. Anyway, as far as length of service

goes, you've got stenographers here you've paid fifteen a week for five

years."

"I'm not going to argue with you, sir," said Mr. Barlow rising.

"Neither am I. I just wanted to tell you I'm quitting."

They stood for a moment looking at each other impassively and then Amory

turned and left the office.

*****

A LITTLE LULL

Four days after that he returned at last to the apartment. Tom was

engaged on a book review for The New Democracy on the staff of which he

was employed. They regarded each other for a moment in silence.

"Well?"

"Well?"

"Good Lord, Amory, where'd you get the black eye--and the jaw?"

Amory laughed.

"That's a mere nothing."

He peeled off his coat and bared his shoulders.

"Look here!"

Tom emitted a low whistle.

"What hit you?"

Amory laughed again.

"Oh, a lot of people. I got beaten up. Fact." He slowly replaced his

shirt. "It was bound to come sooner or later and I wouldn't have missed

it for anything."

"Who was it?"

"Well, there were some waiters and a couple of sailors and a few stray

pedestrians, I guess. It's the strangest feeling. You ought to get

beaten up just for the experience of it. You fall down after a while and

everybody sort of slashes in at you before you hit the ground--then they

kick you."

Tom lighted a cigarette.

"I spent a day chasing you all over town, Amory. But you always kept a

little ahead of me. I'd say you've been on some party."

Amory tumbled into a chair and asked for a cigarette.

"You sober now?" asked Tom quizzically.

"Pretty sober. Why?"

"Well, Alec has left. His family had been after him to go home and live,

so he--"

A spasm of pain shook Amory.

"Too bad."

"Yes, it is too bad. We'll have to get some one else if we're going to

stay here. The rent's going up."

"Sure. Get anybody. I'll leave it to you, Tom."

Amory walked into his bedroom. The first thing that met his glance was

a photograph of Rosalind that he had intended to have framed, propped

up against a mirror on his dresser. He looked at it unmoved. After

the vivid mental pictures of her that were his portion at present, the

portrait was curiously unreal. He went back into the study.

"Got a cardboard box?"

"No," answered Tom, puzzled. "Why should I have? Oh, yes--there may be

one in Alec's room."

Eventually Amory found what he was looking for and, returning to his

dresser, opened a drawer full of letters, notes, part of a chain,

two little handkerchiefs, and some snap-shots. As he transferred them

carefully to the box his mind wandered to some place in a book where

the hero, after preserving for a year a cake of his lost love's soap,

finally washed his hands with it. He laughed and began to hum "After

you've gone" ... ceased abruptly...

The string broke twice, and then he managed to secure it, dropped

the package into the bottom of his trunk, and having slammed the lid

returned to the study.

"Going out?" Tom's voice held an undertone of anxiety.

"Uh-huh."

"Where?"

"Couldn't say, old keed."

"Let's have dinner together."

"Sorry. I told Sukey Brett I'd eat with him."

"Oh."

"By-by."

Amory crossed the street and had a high-ball; then he walked to

Washington Square and found a top seat on a bus. He disembarked at

Forty-third Street and strolled to the Biltmore bar.

"Hi, Amory!"

"What'll you have?"

"Yo-ho! Waiter!"

*****

TEMPERATURE NORMAL

The advent of prohibition with the "thirsty-first" put a sudden stop to

the submerging of Amory's sorrows, and when he awoke one morning to find

that the old bar-to-bar days were over, he had neither remorse for the

past three weeks nor regret that their repetition was impossible. He had

taken the most violent, if the weakest, method to shield himself

from the stabs of memory, and while it was not a course he would

have prescribed for others, he found in the end that it had done its

business: he was over the first flush of pain.

Don't misunderstand! Amory had loved Rosalind as he would never love

another living person. She had taken the first flush of his youth and

brought from his unplumbed depths tenderness that had surprised

him, gentleness and unselfishness that he had never given to another

creature. He had later love-affairs, but of a different sort: in those

he went back to that, perhaps, more typical frame of mind, in which the

girl became the mirror of a mood in him. Rosalind had drawn out what was

more than passionate admiration; he had a deep, undying affection for

Rosalind.

But there had been, near the end, so much dramatic tragedy, culminating

in the arabesque nightmare of his three weeks' spree, that he was

emotionally worn out. The people and surroundings that he remembered as

being cool or delicately artificial, seemed to promise him a refuge. He

wrote a cynical story which featured his father's funeral and despatched

it to a magazine, receiving in return a check for sixty dollars and a

request for more of the same tone. This tickled his vanity, but inspired

him to no further effort.

He read enormously. He was puzzled and depressed by "A Portrait of the

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