This Side of Paradise: Book Two: Chapters 4–5

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.

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

“Oh staunch old heart who toiled so long for me,
I waste my years sailing along the sea—”

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

Then Amory went briskly to the bureau and, taking his pocket-book, beckoned peremptorily to the girl.

He realized that he was safe and only then did he appreciate the full enormity of what he might have incurred.

“Let’s get out of here. We don’t need a valedictory.”

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Sarah makes an unsophisticated remark and the faces simper in delight—“How innocent the poor child is!”

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.

Here he might live a strange litany, delivered from right and wrong and from the hound of heaven and from every God—delivered from success and hope and poverty into that long chute of indulgence which led, after all, only to the artificial lake of death.

The mystical reveries of saints that had once filled him with awe in the still hours of night, now vaguely repelled him.

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

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.

The man in the street heard the conclusions of dead genius through some one else’s clever paradoxes and didactic epigrams.

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.

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.

So engrossed in his thoughts was he that he was scarcely surprised at that strange phenomenon—cordiality manifested within fifty miles of Manhattan—when a passing car slowed down beside him and a voice hailed him.

“Do you want a lift?” asked the apparently artificial growth, glancing from the corner of his eye at the imposing man as if for some habitual, silent corroboration.

Amory noticed that he was inclined to stare straight at the back of the chauffeur’s head as if speculating steadily but hopelessly some baffling hirsute problem.

He was of that lower secretarial type who at forty have engraved upon their business cards: “Assistant to the President,” and without a sigh consecrate the rest of their lives to second-hand mannerisms.

“Well,” said Amory, “if being an idealist is both safe and lucrative, I might try it.”

“You people never make concessions until they’re wrung out of you.”

“No, it isn’t silly. It’s quite plausible. If you’d gone to college you’d have been struck by the fact that the men there would work twice as hard for any one of a hundred petty honors as those other men did who were earning their way through.”

The idea that to make a man work you’ve got to hold gold in front of his eyes is a growth, not an axiom.

One minute they call Wilson ‘just a dreamer, not practical’—a year later they rail at him for making his dreams realities.

The theory that people are fit to govern themselves rests on this man. If he can be educated to think clearly, concisely, and logically, freed of his habit of taking refuge in platitudes and prejudices and sentimentalisms, then I’m a militant Socialist.

Even if, deep in my heart, I thought we were all blind atoms in a world as limited as a stroke of a pendulum, I and my sort would struggle against tradition; try, at least, to displace old cants with new ones.

He saw the two pictures together with somewhat the same primitive exaltation—two games he had played, differing in quality of acerbity, linked in a way that differed them from Rosalind or the subject of labyrinths which were, after all, the business of life.

In a sense this gradual renunciation of beauty was the second step after his disillusion had been made complete. He felt that he was leaving behind him his chance of being a certain type of artist.

As an endless dream it went on; the spirit of the past brooding over a new generation, the chosen youth from the muddled, unchastened world, still fed romantically on the mistakes and half-forgotten dreams of dead statesmen and poets.