This Side of Paradise (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) (35 page)

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 lady should live ... and now we have no real interest in her.... The irony of it is that if he had cared
more
for the poem 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 thee 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—‘tump-tump-tump-a-tump.’ Have you ever been feverish and had all noises divide into ‘tump-tump-tump’ until you could swear eternity was divisible into so many tumps? That’s the way I feel—old horses go tump-tump.... I guess that’s the only thing that separates horses and clocks from us. Human beings can’t go ‘tump-tump-tump’ without going crazy.”

The breeze freshened and Eleanor pulled her cape around her and shivered.

“Are you very cold?” asked Amory.

“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 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,
⁸
but it’s rotten that every bit of real love in the world is ninety-nine per cent passion and one little soupçon 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.

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 drivers’ 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.