Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald (Illustrated) (30 page)

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.