THE COLLAPSE OF SEVERAL PILLARS

Two days later back in New York Amory found in a newspaper what he

had been searching for--a dozen lines which announced to whom it might

concern that Mr. Amory Blaine, who "gave his address" as, etc., had been

requested to leave his hotel in Atlantic City because of entertaining in

his room a 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 sombre luxury of wanting

her--not this Rosalind, harder, older--nor any beaten, broken woman that

his imagination brought to the door of his forties--Amory had wanted her

youth, the fresh radiance of her mind and body, the stuff that she was

selling now once and for all. So far as he was concerned, young Rosalind

was dead.

A day later came a crisp, terse letter from Mr. Barton in Chicago, which

informed him that as three more street-car companies had gone into

the hands of receivers he could expect for the present no further

remittances. Last of all, on a dazed Sunday night, a telegram told him

of Monsignor Darcy's sudden death in Philadelphia five days before.

He knew then what it was that he had perceived among the curtains of the

room in Atlantic City.

CHAPTER 5. 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 greying 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 theatre Amory stood, watching the first

great drops of rain splatter down and flatten to dark stains on the

sidewalk. The air became gray and opalescent; a solitary light suddenly

outlined a window over the way; then another light; then a hundred more

danced and glimmered into vision. Under his feet a thick, iron-studded

skylight turned yellow; in the street the lamps of the taxi-cabs sent

out glistening sheens along the already black pavement. The unwelcome

November rain had perversely stolen the day's last hour and pawned it

with that ancient fence, the night.

The silence of the theatre behind him ended with a curious snapping

sound, followed by the heavy roaring of a rising crowd and the

interlaced clatter of many voices. The matinee was over.

He stood aside, edged a little into the rain to let the throng pass. A

small boy rushed out, sniffed in the damp, fresh air and turned up the

collar of his coat; came three or four couples in a great hurry; came

a further scattering of people whose eyes as they emerged glanced

invariably, first at the wet street, then at the rain-filled air,

finally at the dismal sky; last a dense, strolling mass that depressed

him with its heavy odor compounded of the tobacco smell of the men and

the fetid sensuousness of stale powder on women. After the thick crowd

came another scattering; a stray half-dozen; a man on crutches; finally

the rattling bang of folding seats inside announced that the ushers were

at work.

New York seemed not so much awakening as turning over in its bed. Pallid

men rushed by, pinching together their coat-collars; a great swarm of

tired, magpie girls from a department-store crowded along with shrieks

of strident laughter, three to an umbrella; a squad of marching

policemen passed, already miraculously protected by oilskin capes.

The rain gave Amory a feeling of detachment, and the numerous unpleasant

aspects of city life without money occurred to him in threatening

procession. There was the ghastly, stinking crush of the subway--the car

cards thrusting themselves at one, leering out like dull bores who grab

your arm with another story; the querulous worry as to whether some one

isn't leaning on you; a man deciding not to give his seat to a woman,

hating her for it; the woman hating him for not doing it; at worst a

squalid phantasmagoria of breath, and old cloth on human bodies and the

smells of the food men ate--at best just people--too hot or too cold,

tired, worried.

He pictured the rooms where these people lived--where the patterns of

the blistered wall-papers were heavy reiterated sunflowers on green and

yellow backgrounds, where there were tin bathtubs and gloomy hallways

and verdureless, unnamable spaces in back of the buildings; where even

love dressed as seduction--a sordid murder around the corner, illicit

motherhood in the flat above. And always there was the economical

stuffiness of indoor winter, and the long summers, nightmares of

perspiration between sticky enveloping walls... dirty restaurants where

careless, tired people helped themselves to sugar with their own used

coffee-spoons, leaving hard brown deposits in the bowl.

It was not so bad where there were only men or else only women; it was

when they were vilely herded that it all seemed so rotten. It was some

shame that women gave off at having men see them tired and poor--it

was some disgust that men had for women who were tired and poor. It was

dirtier than any battle-field he had seen, harder to contemplate than

any actual hardship moulded of mire and sweat and danger, it was an

atmosphere wherein birth and marriage and death were loathsome, secret

things.

He remembered one day in the subway when a delivery boy had brought in a

great funeral wreath of fresh flowers, how the smell of it had suddenly

cleared the air and given every one in the car a momentary glow.

"I detest poor people," thought Amory suddenly. "I hate them for being

poor. Poverty may have been beautiful once, but it's rotten now. It's

the ugliest thing in the world. It's essentially cleaner to be corrupt

and rich than it is to be innocent and poor." He seemed to see again a

figure whose significance had once impressed him--a well-dressed young

man gazing from a club window on Fifth Avenue and saying something to

his companion with a look of utter disgust. Probably, thought Amory,

what he said was: "My God! Aren't people horrible!"

Never before in his life had Amory considered poor people. He thought

cynically how completely he was lacking in all human sympathy. O. Henry

had found in these people romance, pathos, love, hate--Amory saw only

coarseness, physical filth, and stupidity. He made no self-accusations:

never any more did he reproach himself for feelings that were

natural and sincere. He accepted all his reactions as a part of him,

unchangeable, unmoral. This problem of poverty transformed, magnified,

attached to some grander, more dignified attitude might some day even be

his problem; at present it roused only his profound distaste.

He walked over to Fifth Avenue, dodging the blind, black menace of

umbrellas, and standing in front of Delmonico's hailed an auto-bus.

Buttoning his coat closely around him he climbed to the roof, where he

rode in solitary state through the thin, persistent rain, stung

into alertness by the cool moisture perpetually reborn on his cheek.

Somewhere in his mind a conversation began, rather resumed its place

in his attention. It was composed not of two voices, but of one, which

acted alike as questioner and answerer:

Question.--Well--what's the situation?

Answer.--That I have about twenty-four dollars to my name.

Q.--You have the Lake Geneva estate.

A.--But I intend to keep it.

Q.--Can you live?

A.--I can't imagine not being able to. People make money in books and

I've found that I can always do the things that people do in books.

Really they are the only things I can do.

Q.--Be definite.

A.--I don't know what I'll do--nor have I much curiosity. To-morrow I'm

going to leave New York for good. It's a bad town unless you're on top

of it.

Q.--Do you want a lot of money?

A.--No. I am merely afraid of being poor.

Q.--Very afraid?

A.--Just passively afraid.

Q.--Where are you drifting?

A.--Don't ask _me!_

Q.--Don't you care?

A.--Rather. I don't want to commit moral suicide.

Q.--Have you no interests left?

A.--None. I've no more virtue to lose. Just as a cooling pot gives

off heat, so all through youth and adolescence we give off calories of

virtue. That's what's called ingenuousness.

Q.--An interesting idea.

A.--That's why a "good man going wrong" attracts people. They stand

around and literally _warm themselves_ at the calories of virtue he

gives off. Sarah makes an unsophisticated remark and the faces simper in

delight--"How _innocent_ the poor child is!" They're warming themselves

at her virtue. But Sarah sees the simper and never makes that remark

again. Only she feels a little colder after that.

Q.--All your calories gone?

A.--All of them. I'm beginning to warm myself at other people's virtue.

Q.--Are you corrupt?

A.--I think so. I'm not sure. I'm not sure about good and evil at all

any more.

Q.--Is that a bad sign in itself?

A.--Not necessarily.

Q.--What would be the test of corruption?

A.--Becoming really insincere--calling myself "not such a bad fellow,"

thinking I regretted my lost youth when I only envy the delights of

losing it. Youth is like having a big plate of candy. Sentimentalists

think they want to be in the pure, simple state they were in before they

ate the candy. They don't. They just want the fun of eating it all over

again. The matron doesn't want to repeat her girlhood--she wants to

repeat her honeymoon. I don't want to repeat my innocence. I want the

pleasure of losing it again.

Q.--Where are you drifting?

This dialogue merged grotesquely into his mind's most familiar state--a

grotesque blending of desires, worries, exterior impressions and

physical reactions.

One Hundred and Twenty-seventh Street--or One Hundred and Thirty-seventh

Street.... Two and three look alike--no, not much. Seat damp... are

clothes absorbing wetness from seat, or seat absorbing dryness from

clothes?... Sitting on wet substance gave appendicitis, so Froggy

Parker's mother said. Well, he'd had it--I'll sue the steamboat company,

Beatrice said, and my uncle has a quarter interest--did Beatrice go to

heaven?... probably not--He represented Beatrice's immortality, also

love-affairs of numerous dead men who surely had never thought of

him... if it wasn't appendicitis, influenza maybe. What? One Hundred

and Twentieth Street? That must have been One Hundred and Twelfth back

there. One O Two instead of One Two Seven. Rosalind not like Beatrice,

Eleanor like Beatrice, only wilder and brainier. Apartments along here

expensive--probably hundred and fifty a month--maybe two hundred. Uncle

had only paid hundred a month for whole great big house in Minneapolis.

Question--were the stairs on the left or right as you came in? Anyway,

in 12 Univee they were straight back and to the left. What a dirty

river--want to go down there and see if it's dirty--French rivers all

brown or black, so were Southern rivers. Twenty-four dollars meant four

hundred and eighty doughnuts. He could live on it three months and sleep

in the park. Wonder where Jill was--Jill Bayne, Fayne, Sayne--what the

devil--neck hurts, darned uncomfortable seat. No desire to sleep with

Jill, what could Alec see in her? Alec had a coarse taste in women. Own

taste the best; Isabelle, Clara, Rosalind, Eleanor, were all-American.

Eleanor would pitch, probably southpaw. Rosalind was outfield, wonderful

hitter, Clara first base, maybe. Wonder what Humbird's body looked like

now. If he himself hadn't been bayonet instructor he'd have gone up

to line three months sooner, probably been killed. Where's the darned

bell--

The street numbers of Riverside Drive were obscured by the mist and

dripping trees from anything but the swiftest scrutiny, but Amory had

finally caught sight of one--One Hundred and Twenty-seventh Street. He

got off and with no distinct destination followed a winding, descending

sidewalk and came out facing the river, in particular a long pier and

a partitioned litter of shipyards for miniature craft: small launches,

canoes, rowboats, and catboats. He turned northward and followed the

shore, jumped a small wire fence and found himself in a great disorderly

yard adjoining a dock. The hulls of many boats in various stages of

repair were around him; he smelled sawdust and paint and the scarcely

distinguishable fiat odor of the Hudson. A man approached through the

heavy gloom.

"Hello," said Amory.

"Got a pass?"

"No. Is this private?"

"This is the Hudson River Sporting and Yacht Club."

"Oh! I didn't know. I'm just resting."

"Well--" began the man dubiously.

"I'll go if you want me to."

The man made non-committal noises in his throat and passed on. Amory

seated himself on an overturned boat and leaned forward thoughtfully

until his chin rested in his hand.

"Misfortune is liable to make me a damn bad man," he said slowly.

*****

IN THE DROOPING HOURS

While the rain drizzled on Amory looked futilely back at the stream of

his life, all its glitterings and dirty shallows. To begin with, he was

still afraid--not physically afraid any more, but afraid of people and

prejudice and misery and monotony. Yet, deep in his bitter heart, he

wondered if he was after all worse than this man or the next. He knew

that he could sophisticate himself finally into saying that his own

weakness was just the result of circumstances and environment; that

often when he raged at himself as an egotist something would whisper

ingratiatingly: "No. Genius!" That was one manifestation of fear, that

voice which whispered that he could not be both great and good, that

genius was the exact combination of those inexplicable grooves and

twists in his mind, that any discipline would curb it to mediocrity.

Probably more than any concrete vice or failing Amory despised his own

personality--he loathed knowing that to-morrow and the thousand days

after he would swell pompously at a compliment and sulk at an ill word

like a third-rate musician or a first-class actor. He was ashamed of the

fact that very simple and honest people usually distrusted him; that

he had been cruel, often, to those who had sunk their personalities in

him--several girls, and a man here and there through college, that he

had been an evil influence on; people who had followed him here and

there into mental adventures from which he alone rebounded unscathed.

Usually, on nights like this, for there had been many lately, he could

escape from this consuming introspection by thinking of children and the

infinite possibilities of children--he leaned and listened and he heard

a startled baby awake in a house across the street and lend a tiny

whimper to the still night. Quick as a flash he turned away, wondering

with a touch of panic whether something in the brooding despair of his

mood had made a darkness in its tiny soul. He shivered. What if some

day the balance was overturned, and he became a thing that frightened

children and crept into rooms in the dark, approached dim communion with

those phantoms who whispered shadowy secrets to the mad of that dark

continent upon the moon....

*****

Amory smiled a bit.

"You're too much wrapped up in yourself," he heard some one say. And

again--

"Get out and do some real work--"

"Stop worrying--"

He fancied a possible future comment of his own.

"Yes--I was perhaps an egotist in youth, but I soon found it made me

morbid to think too much about myself."

*****

Suddenly he felt an overwhelming desire to let himself go to the

devil--not to go violently as a gentleman should, but to sink safely

and sensuously out of sight. He pictured himself in an adobe house in

Mexico, half-reclining on a rug-covered couch, his slender, artistic

fingers closed on a cigarette while he listened to guitars strumming

melancholy undertones to an age-old dirge of Castile and an

olive-skinned, carmine-lipped girl caressed his hair. Here he might live

a strange litany, delivered from right and wrong and from the hound of

heaven and from every God (except the exotic Mexican one who was pretty

slack himself and rather addicted to Oriental scents)--delivered from

success and hope and poverty into that long chute of indulgence which

led, after all, only to the artificial lake of death.

There were so many places where one might deteriorate pleasantly: Port

Said, Shanghai, parts of Turkestan, Constantinople, the South Seas--all

lands of sad, haunting music and many odors, where lust could be a mode

and expression of life, where the shades of night skies and sunsets

would seem to reflect only moods of passion: the colors of lips and

poppies.

*****

STILL WEEDING

Once he had been miraculously able to scent evil as a horse detects a

broken bridge at night, but the man with the queer feet in Phoebe's

room had diminished to the aura over Jill. His instinct perceived the

fetidness of poverty, but no longer ferreted out the deeper evils in

pride and sensuality.

There were no more wise men; there were no more heroes; Burne Holiday

was sunk from sight as though he had never lived; Monsignor was dead.

Amory had grown up to a thousand books, a thousand lies; he had listened

eagerly to people who pretended to know, who knew nothing. The mystical

reveries of saints that had once filled him with awe in the still hours

of night, now vaguely repelled him. The Byrons and Brookes who had

defied life from mountain tops were in the end but flaneurs and poseurs,

at best mistaking the shadow of courage for the substance of wisdom.

The pageantry of his disillusion took shape in a world-old procession

of Prophets, Athenians, Martyrs, Saints, Scientists, Don Juans, Jesuits,

Puritans, Fausts, Poets, Pacifists; like costumed alumni at a college

reunion they streamed before him as their dreams, personalities, and

creeds had in turn thrown colored lights on his soul; each had tried to

express the glory of life and the tremendous significance of man; each

had boasted of synchronizing what had gone before into his own rickety

generalities; each had depended after all on the set stage and the

convention of the theatre, which is that man in his hunger for faith

will feed his mind with the nearest and most convenient food.

Women--of whom he had expected so much; whose beauty he had hoped to

transmute into modes of art; whose unfathomable instincts, marvellously

incoherent and inarticulate, he had thought to perpetuate in terms of

experience--had become merely consecrations to their own posterity.

Isabelle, Clara, Rosalind, Eleanor, were all removed by their

very beauty, around which men had swarmed, from the possibility of

contributing anything but a sick heart and a page of puzzled words to

write.

Amory based his loss of faith in help from others on several sweeping

syllogisms. Granted that his generation, however bruised and decimated

from this Victorian war, were the heirs of progress. Waving aside petty

differences of conclusions which, although they might occasionally

cause the deaths of several millions of young men, might be explained

away--supposing that after all Bernard Shaw and Bernhardi, Bonar Law

and Bethmann-Hollweg were mutual heirs of progress if only in agreeing

against the ducking of witches--waiving the antitheses and approaching

individually these men who seemed to be the leaders, he was repelled by

the discrepancies and contradictions in the men themselves.

There was, for example, Thornton Hancock, respected by half the

intellectual world as an authority on life, a man who had verified and

believed the code he lived by, an educator of educators, an adviser to

Presidents--yet Amory knew that this man had, in his heart, leaned on

the priest of another religion.

And Monsignor, upon whom a cardinal rested, had moments of strange and

horrible insecurity--inexplicable in a religion that explained even

disbelief in terms of its own faith: if you doubted the devil it was the

devil that made you doubt him. Amory had seen Monsignor go to the houses

of stolid philistines, read popular novels furiously, saturate himself

in routine, to escape from that horror.

And this priest, a little wiser, somewhat purer, had been, Amory knew,

not essentially older than he.

Amory was alone--he had escaped from a small enclosure into a great

labyrinth. He was where Goethe was when he began "Faust"; he was where

Conrad was when he wrote "Almayer's Folly."

Amory said to himself that there were essentially two sorts of people

who through natural clarity or disillusion left the enclosure and

sought the labyrinth. There were men like Wells and Plato, who had,

half unconsciously, a strange, hidden orthodoxy, who would accept

for themselves only what could be accepted for all men--incurable

romanticists who never, for all their efforts, could enter the labyrinth

as stark souls; there were on the other hand sword-like pioneering

personalities, Samuel Butler, Renan, Voltaire, who progressed much

slower, yet eventually much further, not in the direct pessimistic line

of speculative philosophy but concerned in the eternal attempt to attach

a positive value to life....

Amory stopped. He began for the first time in his life to have a strong

distrust of all generalities and epigrams. They were too easy, too

dangerous to the public mind. Yet all thought usually reached the

public after thirty years in some such form: Benson and Chesterton had

popularized Huysmans and Newman; Shaw had sugar-coated Nietzsche and

Ibsen and Schopenhauer. The man in the street heard the conclusions

of dead genius through some one else's clever paradoxes and didactic

epigrams.

Life was a damned muddle... a football game with every one off-side and

the referee gotten rid of--every one claiming the referee would have

been on his side....

Progress was a labyrinth... people plunging blindly in and then rushing

wildly back, shouting that they had found it... the invisible king--the

elan vital--the principle of evolution... writing a book, starting a

war, founding a school....

Amory, even had he not been a selfish man, would have started all

inquiries with himself. He was his own best example--sitting in the

rain, a human creature of sex and pride, foiled by chance and his own

temperament of the balm of love and children, preserved to help in

building up the living consciousness of the race.

In self-reproach and loneliness and disillusion he came to the entrance

of the labyrinth.

*****

Another dawn flung itself across the river, a belated taxi hurried along

the street, its lamps still shining like burning eyes in a face white

from a night's carouse. A melancholy siren sounded far down the river.

*****

MONSIGNOR

Amory kept thinking how Monsignor would have enjoyed his own funeral.

It was magnificently Catholic and liturgical. Bishop O'Neill sang solemn

high mass and the cardinal gave the final absolutions. Thornton Hancock,

Mrs. Lawrence, the British and Italian ambassadors, the papal delegate,

and a host of friends and priests were there--yet the inexorable shears

had cut through all these threads that Monsignor had gathered into his

hands. To Amory it was a haunting grief to see him lying in his coffin,

with closed hands upon his purple vestments. His face had not changed,

and, as he never knew he was dying, it showed no pain or fear. It was

Amory's dear old friend, his and the others'--for the church was full

of people with daft, staring faces, the most exalted seeming the most

stricken.

The cardinal, like an archangel in cope and mitre, sprinkled the holy

water; the organ broke into sound; the choir began to sing the Requiem

Eternam.

All these people grieved because they had to some extent depended upon

Monsignor. Their grief was more than sentiment for the "crack in his

voice or a certain break in his walk," as Wells put it. These people

had leaned on Monsignor's faith, his way of finding cheer, of making

religion a thing of lights and shadows, making all light and shadow

merely aspects of God. People felt safe when he was near.

Of Amory's attempted sacrifice had been born merely the full realization

of his disillusion, but of Monsignor's funeral was born the romantic

elf who was to enter the labyrinth with him. He found something that he

wanted, had always wanted and always would want--not to be admired, as

he had feared; not to be loved, as he had made himself believe; but to

be necessary to people, to be indispensable; he remembered the sense of

security he had found in Burne.

Life opened up in one of its amazing bursts of radiance and Amory

suddenly and permanently rejected an old epigram that had been playing

listlessly in his mind: "Very few things matter and nothing matters very

much."

On the contrary, Amory felt an immense desire to give people a sense of

security.

*****

Date: 2015-02-16; view: 741