Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald (Illustrated) (26 page)

Amory laughed.

“You don’t know how true you spoke. No idea. ‘At’s the whole trouble.”

AMORY ON THE LABOR QUESTION

Two mornings later he knocked at the president’s door at Bascome and Barlow’s advertising agency.

“Come in!”

Amory entered unsteadily.

“‘Morning, Mr. Barlow.”

Mr. Barlow brought his glasses to the inspection and set his mouth slightly ajar that he might better listen.

“Well, Mr. Blaine. We haven’t seen you for several days.”

“No,” said Amory. “I’m quitting.”

“Well — well — this is — “

“I don’t like it here.”

“I’m sorry. I thought our relations had been quite — ah — pleasant. You seemed to be a hard worker — a little inclined perhaps to write fancy copy — “

“I just got tired of it,” interrupted Amory rudely. “It didn’t matter a damn to me whether Harebell’s flour was any better than any one else’s. In fact, I never ate any of it. So I got tired of telling people about it — oh, I know I’ve been drinking — “

Mr. Barlow’s face steeled by several ingots of expression.

“You asked for a position — “

Amory waved him to silence.

“And I think I was rottenly underpaid. Thirty-five dollars a week — less than a good carpenter.”

“You had just started. You’d never worked before,” said Mr. Barlow coolly.

“But it took about ten thousand dollars to educate me where I could write your darned stuff for you. Anyway, as far as length of service goes, you’ve got stenographers here you’ve paid fifteen a week for five years.”

“I’m not going to argue with you, sir,” said Mr. Barlow rising.

“Neither am I. I just wanted to tell you I’m quitting.”

They stood for a moment looking at each other impassively and then Amory turned and left the office.

A LITTLE LULL

Four days after that he returned at last to the apartment. Tom was engaged on a book review for The New Democracy on the staff of which he was employed. They regarded each other for a moment in silence.

“Well?”

“Well?”

“Good Lord, Amory, where’d you get the black eye — and the jaw?”

Amory laughed.

“That’s a mere nothing.”

He peeled off his coat and bared his shoulders.

“Look here!”

Tom emitted a low whistle.

“What hit you?”

Amory laughed again.

“Oh, a lot of people. I got beaten up. Fact.” He slowly replaced his shirt. “It was bound to come sooner or later and I wouldn’t have missed it for anything.”

“Who was it?”

“Well, there were some waiters and a couple of sailors and a few stray pedestrians, I guess. It’s the strangest feeling. You ought to get beaten up just for the experience of it. You fall down after a while and everybody sort of slashes in at you before you hit the ground — then they kick you.”

Tom lighted a cigarette.

“I spent a day chasing you all over town, Amory. But you always kept a little ahead of me. I’d say you’ve been on some party.”

Amory tumbled into a chair and asked for a cigarette.

“You sober now?” asked Tom quizzically.

“Pretty sober. Why?”

“Well, Alec has left. His family had been after him to go home and live, so he — “

A spasm of pain shook Amory.

“Too bad.”

“Yes, it is too bad. We’ll have to get some one else if we’re going to stay here. The rent’s going up.”

“Sure. Get anybody. I’ll leave it to you, Tom.”

Amory walked into his bedroom. The first thing that met his glance was a photograph of Rosalind that he had intended to have framed, propped up against a mirror on his dresser. He looked at it unmoved. After the vivid mental pictures of her that were his portion at present, the portrait was curiously unreal. He went back into the study.

“Got a cardboard box?”

“No,” answered Tom, puzzled. “Why should I have? Oh, yes — there may be one in Alec’s room.”

Eventually Amory found what he was looking for and, returning to his dresser, opened a drawer full of letters, notes, part of a chain, two little handkerchiefs, and some snap-shots. As he transferred them carefully to the box his mind wandered to some place in a book where the hero, after preserving for a year a cake of his lost love’s soap, finally washed his hands with it. He laughed and began to hum “After you’ve gone” ... ceased abruptly...

The string broke twice, and then he managed to secure it, dropped the package into the bottom of his trunk, and having slammed the lid returned to the study.

“Going out?” Tom’s voice held an undertone of anxiety.

“Uh-huh.”

“Where?”

“Couldn’t say, old keed.”

“Let’s have dinner together.”

“Sorry. I told Sukey Brett I’d eat with him.”

“Oh.”

“By-by.”

Amory crossed the street and had a high-ball; then he walked to Washington Square and found a top seat on a bus. He disembarked at Forty-third Street and strolled to the Biltmore bar.

“Hi, Amory!”

“What’ll you have?”

“Yo-ho! Waiter!”

TEMPERATURE NORMAL

The advent of prohibition with the “thirsty-first” put a sudden stop to the submerging of Amory’s sorrows, and when he awoke one morning to find that the old bar-to-bar days were over, he had neither remorse for the past three weeks nor regret that their repetition was impossible. He had taken the most violent, if the weakest, method to shield himself from the stabs of memory, and while it was not a course he would have prescribed for others, he found in the end that it had done its business: he was over the first flush of pain.

Don’t misunderstand! Amory had loved Rosalind as he would never love another living person. She had taken the first flush of his youth and brought from his unplumbed depths tenderness that had surprised him, gentleness and unselfishness that he had never given to another creature. He had later love-affairs, but of a different sort: in those he went back to that, perhaps, more typical frame of mind, in which the girl became the mirror of a mood in him. Rosalind had drawn out what was more than passionate admiration; he had a deep, undying affection for Rosalind.

But there had been, near the end, so much dramatic tragedy, culminating in the arabesque nightmare of his three weeks’ spree, that he was emotionally worn out. The people and surroundings that he remembered as being cool or delicately artificial, seemed to promise him a refuge. He wrote a cynical story which featured his father’s funeral and despatched it to a magazine, receiving in return a check for sixty dollars and a request for more of the same tone. This tickled his vanity, but inspired him to no further effort.

He read enormously. He was puzzled and depressed by “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man”; intensely interested by “Joan and Peter” and “The Undying Fire,” and rather surprised by his discovery through a critic named Mencken of several excellent American novels: “Vandover and the Brute,” “The Damnation of Theron Ware,” and “Jennie Gerhardt.” Mackenzie, Chesterton, Galsworthy, Bennett, had sunk in his appreciation from sagacious, life-saturated geniuses to merely diverting contemporaries. Shaw’s aloof clarity and brilliant consistency and the gloriously intoxicated efforts of H. G. Wells to fit the key of romantic symmetry into the elusive lock of truth, alone won his rapt attention.

He wanted to see Monsignor Darcy, to whom he had written when he landed, but he had not heard from him; besides he knew that a visit to Monsignor would entail the story of Rosalind, and the thought of repeating it turned him cold with horror.

In his search for cool people he remembered Mrs. Lawrence, a very intelligent, very dignified lady, a convert to the church, and a great devotee of Monsignor’s.

He called her on the ‘phone one day. Yes, she remembered him perfectly; no, Monsignor wasn’t in town, was in Boston she thought; he’d promised to come to dinner when he returned. Couldn’t Amory take luncheon with her?

“I thought I’d better catch up, Mrs. Lawrence,” he said rather ambiguously when he arrived.

“Monsignor was here just last week,” said Mrs. Lawrence regretfully. “He was very anxious to see you, but he’d left your address at home.”

“Did he think I’d plunged into Bolshevism?” asked Amory, interested.

“Oh, he’s having a frightful time.”

“Why?”

“About the IrishRepublic. He thinks it lacks dignity.”

“So?”

“He went to Boston when the Irish President arrived and he was greatly distressed because the receiving committee, when they rode in an automobile,
would
put their arms around the President.”

“I don’t blame him.”

“Well, what impressed you more than anything while you were in the army? You look a great deal older.”

“That’s from another, more disastrous battle,” he answered, smiling in spite of himself. “But the army — let me see — well, I discovered that physical courage depends to a great extent on the physical shape a man is in. I found that I was as brave as the next man — it used to worry me before.”

“What else?”

“Well, the idea that men can stand anything if they get used to it, and the fact that I got a high mark in the psychological examination.”

Mrs. Lawrence laughed. Amory was finding it a great relief to be in this cool house on Riverside Drive, away from more condensed New York and the sense of people expelling great quantities of breath into a little space. Mrs. Lawrence reminded him vaguely of Beatrice, not in temperament, but in her perfect grace and dignity. The house, its furnishings, the manner in which dinner was served, were in immense contrast to what he had met in the great places on Long Island, where the servants were so obtrusive that they had positively to be bumped out of the way, or even in the houses of more conservative “Union Club” families. He wondered if this air of symmetrical restraint, this grace, which he felt was continental, was distilled through Mrs. Lawrence’s New England ancestry or acquired in long residence in Italy and Spain.

Two glasses of sauterne at luncheon loosened his tongue, and he talked, with what he felt was something of his old charm, of religion and literature and the menacing phenomena of the social order. Mrs. Lawrence was ostensibly pleased with him, and her interest was especially in his mind; he wanted people to like his mind again — after a while it might be such a nice place in which to live.

“Monsignor Darcy still thinks that you’re his reincarnation, that your faith will eventually clarify.”

“Perhaps,” he assented. “I’m rather pagan at present. It’s just that religion doesn’t seem to have the slightest bearing on life at my age.”

When he left her house he walked down Riverside Drive with a feeling of satisfaction. It was amusing to discuss again such subjects as this young poet, Stephen Vincent Benet, or the IrishRepublic. Between the rancid accusations of Edward Carson and Justice Cohalan he had completely tired of the Irish question; yet there had been a time when his own Celtic traits were pillars of his personal philosophy.

There seemed suddenly to be much left in life, if only this revival of old interests did not mean that he was backing away from it again — backing away from life itself.

RESTLESSNESS

“I’m tres old and tres bored, Tom,” said Amory one day, stretching himself at ease in the comfortable window-seat. He always felt most natural in a recumbent position.

“You used to be entertaining before you started to write,” he continued. “Now you save any idea that you think would do to print.”

Existence had settled back to an ambitionless normality. They had decided that with economy they could still afford the apartment, which Tom, with the domesticity of an elderly cat, had grown fond of. The old English hunting prints on the wall were Tom’s, and the large tapestry by courtesy, a relic of decadent days in college, and the great profusion of orphaned candlesticks and the carved Louis XV chair in which no one could sit more than a minute without acute spinal disorders — Tom claimed that this was because one was sitting in the lap of Montespan’s wraith — at any rate, it was Tom’s furniture that decided them to stay.

They went out very little: to an occasional play, or to dinner at the Ritz or the Princeton Club. With prohibition the great rendezvous had received their death wounds; no longer could one wander to the Biltmore bar at twelve or five and find congenial spirits, and both Tom and Amory had outgrown the passion for dancing with mid-Western or New Jersey debbies at the Club-de-Vingt (surnamed the “Club de Gink”) or the Plaza Rose Room — besides even that required several cocktails “to come down to the intellectual level of the women present,” as Amory had once put it to a horrified matron.

Amory had lately received several alarming letters from Mr. Barton — the Lake Geneva house was too large to be easily rented; the best rent obtainable at present would serve this year to little more than pay for the taxes and necessary improvements; in fact, the lawyer suggested that the whole property was simply a white elephant on Amory’s hands. Nevertheless, even though it might not yield a cent for the next three years, Amory decided with a vague sentimentality that for the present, at any rate, he would not sell the house.

This particular day on which he announced his ennui to Tom had been quite typical. He had risen at noon, lunched with Mrs. Lawrence, and then ridden abstractedly homeward atop one of his beloved buses.

“Why shouldn’t you be bored,” yawned Tom. “Isn’t that the conventional frame of mind for the young man of your age and condition?”

“Yes,” said Amory speculatively, “but I’m more than bored; I am restless.”

“Love and war did for you.”

“Well,” Amory considered, “I’m not sure that the war itself had any great effect on either you or me — but it certainly ruined the old backgrounds, sort of killed individualism out of our generation.”

Tom looked up in surprise.

“Yes it did,” insisted Amory. “I’m not sure it didn’t kill it out of the whole world. Oh, Lord, what a pleasure it used to be to dream I might be a really great dictator or writer or religious or political leader — and now even a Leonardo da Vinci or Lorenzo de Medici couldn’t be a real old-fashioned bolt in the world. Life is too huge and complex. The world is so overgrown that it can’t lift its own fingers, and I was planning to be such an important finger — “