CHAPTER 2. Spires and Gargoyles 15 page

They were riding up close by the cliff and Amory 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 hipped on

Freud and all that, but it's rotten that every bit of _real_ love in

the world is ninety-nine per cent passion and one little soupcon 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 every one's got to have some cloak to throw around it. The

mediocre intellects, Plato's second class, use 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 his 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 or the maxims of

Confucius?"

Amory looked up, rather taken 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 repentant with gabble-gabble about the

sixth and ninth commandments. It's just all cloaks, sentiment and

spiritual rouge and panaceas. I'll tell you 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," Amory 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 death-bed."

Eleanor drew her horse up sharply and he reined 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 clangor. 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 whinny. 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 onto 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--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 lilt of the water,

Lisping its music and bearing a burden of light,

Bosoming day as a laughing and radiant daughter...

Here we may whisper unheard, unafraid of the night.

Walking alone... was it splendor, or what, we were bound with,

Deep in the time when summer lets down her hair?

Shadows we loved and the patterns they covered the ground with

Tapestries, mystical, faint in the breathless air.

That was the day... and the night for another story,

Pale as a dream and shadowed with pencilled trees--

Ghosts of the stars came by who had sought for glory,

Whispered to us of peace in the plaintive breeze,

Whispered of old dead faiths that the day had shattered,

Youth the penny that bought delight of the moon;

That was the urge that we knew and the language that 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 if the light is but sun and the little streams sing not,

We are together, it seems... I have loved you so...

What did the last night hold, with the summer over,

Drawing us back to the home in the changing glade?

_What leered out of the dark in the ghostly clover?_

God!... till you stirred in your sleep... and were wild

afraid...

Well... we have passed... we are chronicle now to the eerie.

Curious metal from meteors that failed in the sky;

Earth-born the tireless is stretched by the water, quite weary,

Close to this ununderstandable changeling that's I...

Fear is an echo we traced to Security's daughter;

Now we are faces and voices... and less, too soon,

Whispering half-love over the lilt of the water...

Youth the penny that bought delight of the moon."

*****

A POEM AMORY SENT TO ELEANOR AND WHICH HE CALLED "SUMMER STORM"

"Faint winds, and a song fading and leaves falling,

Faint winds, and far away a fading laughter...

And the rain and over the fields a voice calling...

Our gray blown cloud scurries and lifts above,

Slides on the sun and flutters there to waft her

Sisters on. The shadow of a dove

Falls on the cote, 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...

Wait for the mists and for the blacker rain--

Heavier winds that stir the veil of fate,

Happier winds that pile her hair;

Again

They tear me, teach me, strew 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 have met before;

Wraith-like you drift on out before the rain,

Across the fields, blown with the stemless flowers,

With your old hopes, dead leaves and loves again--

Dim as a dream and wan with all old hours

(Whispers will creep into the growing dark...

Tumult will die over the trees)

Now night

Tears from her wetted breast the splattered blouse

Of day, glides down the dreaming hills, tear-bright,

To cover with her hair the eerie green...

Love for the dusk... Love for the glistening after;

Quiet the trees to their last tops... serene...

Faint winds, and far away a fading laughter..."

CHAPTER 4. The Supercilious Sacrifice

Atlantic City. Amory paced the board walk at day's end, lulled by the

everlasting surge of changing waves, smelling the half-mournful odor of

the salt breeze. The sea, he thought, had treasured its memories deeper

than the faithless land. It seemed still to whisper of Norse galleys

ploughing the water world under raven-figured flags, of the British

dreadnoughts, gray bulwarks of civilization steaming up through the fog

of one dark July into the North Sea.

"Well--Amory Blaine!"

Amory looked down into the street below. A low racing car had drawn to a

stop and a familiar cheerful face protruded from the driver's seat.

"Come on down, goopher!" cried Alec.

Amory called a greeting and descending a flight of wooden steps

approached the car. He and Alec had been meeting intermittently, but the

barrier of Rosalind lay always between them. He was sorry for this; he

hated to lose Alec.

"Mr. Blaine, this is Miss Waterson, Miss Wayne, and Mr. Tully."

"How d'y do?"

"Amory," said Alec exuberantly, "if you'll jump in we'll take you to

some secluded nook and give you a wee jolt of Bourbon."

Amory considered.

"That's an idea."

"Step in--move over, Jill, and Amory will smile very handsomely at you."

Amory squeezed into the back seat beside a gaudy, vermilion-lipped

blonde.

"Hello, Doug Fairbanks," she said flippantly. "Walking for exercise or

hunting for company?"

"I was counting the waves," replied Amory gravely. "I'm going in for

statistics."

"Don't kid me, Doug."

When they reached an unfrequented side street Alec stopped the car among

deep shadows.

"What you doing down here these cold days, Amory?" he demanded, as he

produced a quart of Bourbon from under the fur rug.

Amory avoided the question. Indeed, he had had no definite reason for

coming to the coast.

"Do you remember that party of ours, sophomore year?" he asked instead.

"Do I? When we slept in the pavilions up in Asbury Park--"

"Lord, Alec! It's hard to think that Jesse and Dick and Kerry are all

three dead."

Alec shivered.

"Don't talk about it. These dreary fall days depress me enough."

Jill seemed to agree.

"Doug here is sorta gloomy anyways," she commented. "Tell him to drink

deep--it's good and scarce these days."

"What I really want to ask you, Amory, is where you are--"

"Why, New York, I suppose--"

"I mean to-night, because if you haven't got a room yet you'd better

help me out."

"Glad to."

"You see, Tully and I have two rooms with bath between at the Ranier,

and he's got to go back to New York. I don't want to have to move.

Question is, will you occupy one of the rooms?"

Amory was willing, if he could get in right away.

"You'll find the key in the office; the rooms are in my name."

Declining further locomotion or further stimulation, Amory left the car

and sauntered back along the board walk to the hotel.

He was in an eddy again, a deep, lethargic gulf, without desire to work

or write, love or dissipate. For the first time in his life he rather

longed for death to roll over his generation, obliterating their petty

fevers and struggles and exultations. His youth seemed never so vanished

as now in the contrast between the utter loneliness of this visit and

that riotous, joyful party of four years before. Things that had been

the merest commonplaces of his life then, deep sleep, the sense of

beauty around him, all desire, had flown away and the gaps they left

were filled only with the great listlessness of his disillusion.

"To hold a man a woman has to appeal to the worst in him." This sentence

was the thesis of most of his bad nights, of which he felt this was to

be one. His mind had already started to play variations on the subject.

Tireless passion, fierce jealousy, longing to possess and crush--these

alone were left of all his love for Rosalind; these remained to him as

payment for the loss of his youth--bitter calomel under the thin sugar

of love's exaltation.

In his room he undressed and wrapping himself in blankets to keep out

the chill October air drowsed in an armchair by the open window.

He remembered a poem he had read months before:

"Oh staunch old heart who toiled so long for me,

I waste my years sailing along the sea--"

Yet he had no sense of waste, no sense of the present hope that waste

implied. He felt that life had rejected him.

"Rosalind! Rosalind!" He poured the words softly into the half-darkness

until she seemed to permeate the room; the wet salt breeze filled

his hair with moisture, the rim of a moon seared the sky and made the

curtains dim and ghostly. He fell asleep.

When he awoke it was very late and quiet. The blanket had slipped partly

off his shoulders and he touched his skin to find it damp and cold.

Then he became aware of a tense whispering not ten feet away.

He became rigid.

"Don't make a sound!" It was Alec's voice. "Jill--do you hear me?"

"Yes--" breathed very low, very frightened. They were in the bathroom.

Then his ears caught a louder sound from somewhere along the corridor

outside. It was a mumbling of men's voices and a repeated muffled

rapping. Amory threw off the blankets and moved close to the bathroom

door.

"My God!" came the girl's voice again. "You'll have to let them in."

"Sh!"

Suddenly a steady, insistent knocking began at Amory's hall door

and simultaneously out of the bathroom came Alec, followed by the

vermilion-lipped girl. They were both clad in pajamas.

"Amory!" an anxious whisper.

"What's the trouble?"

"It's house detectives. My God, Amory--they're just looking for a

test-case--"

"Well, better let them in."

"You don't understand. They can get me under the Mann Act."

The girl followed him slowly, a rather miserable, pathetic figure in the

darkness.

Amory tried to plan quickly.

"You make a racket and let them in your room," he suggested anxiously,

"and I'll get her out by this door."

"They're here too, though. They'll watch this door."

"Can't you give a wrong name?"

"No chance. I registered under my own name; besides, they'd trail the

auto license number."

"Say you're married."

"Jill says one of the house detectives knows her."

The girl had stolen to the bed and tumbled upon it; lay there listening

wretchedly to the knocking which had grown gradually to a pounding. Then

came a man's voice, angry and imperative:

"Open up or we'll break the door in!"

In the silence when this voice ceased Amory realized that there were

other things in the room besides people... over and around the figure

crouched on the bed there hung an aura, gossamer as a moonbeam, tainted

as stale, weak wine, yet a horror, diffusively brooding already over

the three of them... and over by the window among the stirring curtains

stood something else, featureless and indistinguishable, yet strangely

familiar.... Simultaneously two great cases presented themselves side by

side to Amory; all that took place in his mind, then, occupied in actual

time less than ten seconds.

The first fact that flashed radiantly on his comprehension was the great

impersonality of sacrifice--he perceived that what we call love and

hate, reward and punishment, had no more to do with it than the date

of the month. He quickly recapitulated the story of a sacrifice he had

heard of in college: a man had cheated in an examination; his roommate

in a gust of sentiment had taken the entire blame--due to the shame

of it the innocent one's entire future seemed shrouded in regret and

failure, capped by the ingratitude of the real culprit. He had finally

taken his own life--years afterward the facts had come out. At the time

the story had both puzzled and worried Amory. Now he realized the truth;

that sacrifice was no purchase of freedom. It was like a great elective

office, it was like an inheritance of power--to certain people at

certain times an essential luxury, carrying with it not a guarantee but

a responsibility, not a security but an infinite risk. Its very momentum

might drag him down to ruin--the passing of the emotional wave that made

it possible might leave the one who made it high and dry forever on an

island of despair.

... Amory knew that afterward Alec would secretly hate him for having

done so much for him....

... All this was flung before Amory like an opened scroll, while

ulterior to him and speculating upon him were those two breathless,

listening forces: the gossamer aura that hung over and about the girl

and that familiar thing by the window.

Sacrifice by its very nature was arrogant and impersonal; sacrifice

should be eternally supercilious.

_Weep not for me but for thy children._

That--thought Amory--would be somehow the way God would talk to me.

Amory felt a sudden surge of joy and then like a face in a

motion-picture the aura over the bed faded out; the dynamic shadow

by the window, that was as near as he could name it, remained for the

fraction of a moment and then the breeze seemed to lift it swiftly out

of the room. He clinched his hands in quick ecstatic excitement... the

ten seconds were up....

"Do what I say, Alec--do what I say. Do you understand?"

Alec looked at him dumbly--his face a tableau of anguish.

"You have a family," continued Amory slowly. "You have a family and it's

important that you should get out of this. Do you hear me?" He repeated

clearly what he had said. "Do you hear me?"

"I hear you." The voice was curiously strained, the eyes never for a

second left Amory's.

"Alec, you're going to lie down here. If any one comes in you act drunk.

You do what I say--if you don't I'll probably kill you."

There was another moment while they stared at each other. Then Amory

went briskly to the bureau and, taking his pocket-book, beckoned

peremptorily to the girl. He heard one word from Alec that sounded like

"penitentiary," then he and Jill were in the bathroom with the door

bolted behind them.

"You're here with me," he said sternly. "You've been with me all

evening."

She nodded, gave a little half cry.

In a second he had the door of the other room open and three men

entered. There was an immediate flood of electric light and he stood

there blinking.

"You've been playing a little too dangerous a game, young man!"

Amory laughed.

"Well?"

The leader of the trio nodded authoritatively at a burly man in a check

suit.

"All right, Olson."

"I got you, Mr. O'May," said Olson, nodding. The other two took a

curious glance at their quarry and then withdrew, closing the door

angrily behind them.

The burly man regarded Amory contemptuously.

"Didn't you ever hear of the Mann Act? Coming down here with her," he

indicated the girl with his thumb, "with a New York license on your

car--to a hotel like _this_." He shook his head implying that he had

struggled over Amory but now gave him up.

"Well," said Amory rather impatiently, "what do you want us to do?"

"Get dressed, quick--and tell your friend not to make such a racket."

Jill was sobbing noisily on the bed, but at these words she subsided

sulkily and, gathering up her clothes, retired to the bathroom. As Amory

slipped into Alec's B. V. D.'s he found that his attitude toward the

situation was agreeably humorous. The aggrieved virtue of the burly man

made him want to laugh.

"Anybody else here?" demanded Olson, trying to look keen and

ferret-like.

"Fellow who had the rooms," said Amory carelessly. "He's drunk as an

owl, though. Been in there asleep since six o'clock."

"I'll take a look at him presently."

"How did you find out?" asked Amory curiously.

"Night clerk saw you go up-stairs with this woman."

Amory nodded; Jill reappeared from the bathroom, completely if rather

untidily arrayed.

"Now then," began Olson, producing a note-book, "I want your real

names--no damn John Smith or Mary Brown."

"Wait a minute," said Amory quietly. "Just drop that big-bully stuff. We

merely got caught, that's all."

Olson glared at him.

"Name?" he snapped.

Amory gave his name and New York address.

"And the lady?"

"Miss Jill--"

"Say," cried Olson indignantly, "just ease up on the nursery rhymes.

What's your name? Sarah Murphy? Minnie Jackson?"

"Oh, my God!" cried the girl cupping her tear-stained face in her hands.

"I don't want my mother to know. I don't want my mother to know."

"Come on now!"

"Shut up!" cried Amory at Olson.

An instant's pause.

"Stella Robbins," she faltered finally. "General Delivery, Rugway, New

Hampshire."

Olson snapped his note-book shut and looked at them very ponderously.

"By rights the hotel could turn the evidence over to the police and

you'd go to penitentiary, you would, for bringin' a girl from one State

to 'nother f'r immoral purp'ses--" He paused to let the majesty of his

words sink in. "But--the hotel is going to let you off."

"It doesn't want to get in the papers," cried Jill fiercely. "Let us

off! Huh!"

A great lightness surrounded Amory. He realized that he was safe and

only then did he appreciate the full enormity of what he might have

incurred.

"However," continued Olson, "there's a protective association among the

hotels. There's been too much of this stuff, and we got a 'rangement

with the newspapers so that you get a little free publicity. Not the

name of the hotel, but just a line sayin' that you had a little trouble

in 'lantic City. See?"

"I see."

"You're gettin' off light--damn light--but--"

"Come on," said Amory briskly. "Let's get out of here. We don't need a

valedictory."

Olson walked through the bathroom and took a cursory glance at Alec's

still form. Then he extinguished the lights and motioned them to follow

him. As they walked into the elevator Amory considered a piece of

bravado--yielded finally. He reached out and tapped Olson on the arm.

Date: 2015-02-16; view: 627