CHAPTER 3. Young Irony
For years afterward when Amory thought of Eleanor he seemed still tohear the wind sobbing around him and sending little chills into theplaces beside his heart. The night when they rode up the slope andwatched the cold moon float through the clouds, he lost a further partof him that nothing could restore; and when he lost it he lost also thepower of regretting it. Eleanor was, say, the last time that evil creptclose to Amory under the mask of beauty, the last weird mystery thatheld him with wild fascination and pounded his soul to flakes.
With her his imagination ran riot and that is why they rode to thehighest hill and watched an evil moon ride high, for they knew then thatthey could see the devil in each other. But Eleanor--did Amory dreamher? Afterward their ghosts played, yet both of them hoped from theirsouls never to meet. Was it the infinite sadness of her eyes that drewhim or the mirror of himself that he found in the gorgeous clarity ofher mind? She will have no other adventure like Amory, and if she readsthis she will say:
"And Amory will have no other adventure like me."
Nor will she sigh, any more than he would sigh.
Eleanor tried to put it on paper once:
"The fading things we only know We'll have forgotten... Put away... Desires that melted with the snow, And dreams begotten This to-day: The sudden dawns we laughed to greet, That all could see, that none could share, Will be but dawns... and if we meet We shall not care.
Dear... not one tear will rise for this... A little while hence No regret Will stir for a remembered kiss-- Not even silence, When we've met, Will give old ghosts a waste to roam, Or stir the surface of the sea... If gray shapes drift beneath the foam We shall not see."
They quarrelled dangerously because Amory maintained that _sea_ and_see_ couldn't possibly be used as a rhyme. And then Eleanor had part ofanother verse that she couldn't find a beginning for:
"... But wisdom passes... still the years Will feed us wisdom.... Age will go Back to the old-- For all our tears We shall not know."
Eleanor hated Maryland passionately. She belonged to the oldest of theold families of Ramilly County and lived in a big, gloomy house with hergrandfather. She had been born and brought up in France.... I see I amstarting wrong. Let me begin again.
Amory was bored, as he usually was in the country. He used to go forfar walks by himself--and wander along reciting "Ulalume" to thecorn-fields, and congratulating Poe for drinking himself to death inthat atmosphere of smiling complacency. One afternoon he had strolledfor several miles along a road that was new to him, and then through awood on bad advice from a colored woman... losing himself entirely. Apassing storm decided to break out, and to his great impatience thesky grew black as pitch and the rain began to splatter down through thetrees, become suddenly furtive and ghostly. Thunder rolled with menacingcrashes up the valley and scattered through the woods in intermittentbatteries. He stumbled blindly on, hunting for a way out, and finally,through webs of twisted branches, caught sight of a rift in the treeswhere the unbroken lightning showed open country. He rushed to the edgeof the woods and then hesitated whether or not to cross the fields andtry to reach the shelter of the little house marked by a light far downthe valley. It was only half past five, but he could see scarcely tensteps before him, except when the lightning made everything vivid andgrotesque for great sweeps around.
Suddenly a strange sound fell on his ears. It was a song, in a low,husky voice, a girl's voice, and whoever was singing was very closeto him. A year before he might have laughed, or trembled; but in hisrestless mood he only stood and listened while the words sank into hisconsciousness:
"Les sanglots longs Des violons De l'automne Blessent mon coeur D'une langueur Monotone."
The lightning split the sky, but the song went on without a quaver. Thegirl was evidently in the field and the voice seemed to come vaguelyfrom a haystack about twenty feet in front of him.
Then it ceased: ceased and began again in a weird chant that soared andhung and fell and blended with the rain:
"Tout suffocant Et bleme quand Sonne l'heure Je me souviens Des jours anciens Et je pleure...."
"Who the devil is there in Ramilly County," muttered Amory aloud, "whowould deliver Verlaine in an extemporaneous tune to a soaking haystack?"
"Somebody's there!" cried the voice unalarmed. "Who are you?--Manfred,St. Christopher, or Queen Victoria?"
"I'm Don Juan!" Amory shouted on impulse, raising his voice above thenoise of the rain and the wind.
A delighted shriek came from the haystack.
"I know who you are--you're the blond boy that likes 'Ulalume'--Irecognize your voice."
"How do I get up?" he cried from the foot of the haystack, whither hehad arrived, dripping wet. A head appeared over the edge--it was so darkthat Amory could just make out a patch of damp hair and two eyes thatgleamed like a cat's.
"Run back!" came the voice, "and jump and I'll catch your hand--no, notthere--on the other side."
He followed directions and as he sprawled up the side, knee-deep in hay,a small, white hand reached out, gripped his, and helped him onto thetop.
"Here you are, Juan," cried she of the damp hair. "Do you mind if I dropthe Don?"
"You've got a thumb like mine!" he exclaimed.
"And you're holding my hand, which is dangerous without seeing my face."He dropped it quickly.
As if in answer to his prayers came a flash of lightning and he lookedeagerly at her who stood beside him on the soggy haystack, ten feetabove the ground. But she had covered her face and he saw nothing but aslender figure, dark, damp, bobbed hair, and the small white hands withthe thumbs that bent back like his.
"Sit down," she suggested politely, as the dark closed in on them. "Ifyou'll sit opposite me in this hollow you can have half of the raincoat,which I was using as a water-proof tent until you so rudely interruptedme."
"I was asked," Amory said joyfully; "you asked me--you know you did."
"Don Juan always manages that," she said, laughing, "but I shan't callyou that any more, because you've got reddish hair. Instead you canrecite 'Ulalume' and I'll be Psyche, your soul."
Amory flushed, happily invisible under the curtain of wind and rain.They were sitting opposite each other in a slight hollow in the hay withthe raincoat spread over most of them, and the rain doing for the rest.Amory was trying desperately to see Psyche, but the lightning refused toflash again, and he waited impatiently. Good Lord! supposing she wasn'tbeautiful--supposing she was forty and pedantic--heavens! Suppose,only suppose, she was mad. But he knew the last was unworthy. Here hadProvidence sent a girl to amuse him just as it sent Benvenuto Cellinimen to murder, and he was wondering if she was mad, just because sheexactly filled his mood.
"I'm not," she said.
"Not what?"
"Not mad. I didn't think you were mad when I first saw you, so it isn'tfair that you should think so of me."
"How on earth--"
As long as they knew each other Eleanor and Amory could be "on asubject" and stop talking with the definite thought of it in theirheads, yet ten minutes later speak aloud and find that their minds hadfollowed the same channels and led them each to a parallel idea, an ideathat others would have found absolutely unconnected with the first.
"Tell me," he demanded, leaning forward eagerly, "how do you know about'Ulalume'--how did you know the color of my hair? What's your name? Whatwere you doing here? Tell me all at once!"
Suddenly the lightning flashed in with a leap of overreaching light andhe saw Eleanor, and looked for the first time into those eyes of hers.Oh, she was magnificent--pale skin, the color of marble in starlight,slender brows, and eyes that glittered green as emeralds in the blindingglare. She was a witch, of perhaps nineteen, he judged, alert and dreamyand with the tell-tale white line over her upper lip that was a weaknessand a delight. He sank back with a
gasp against the wall of hay.
"Now you've seen me," she said calmly, "and I suppose you're about tosay that my green eyes are burning into your brain."
"What color is your hair?" he asked intently. "It's bobbed, isn't it?"
"Yes, it's bobbed. I don't know what color it is," she answered, musing,"so many men have asked me. It's medium, I suppose--No one ever lookslong at my hair. I've got beautiful eyes, though, haven't I. I don'tcare what you say, I have beautiful eyes."
"Answer my question, Madeline."
"Don't remember them all--besides my name isn't Madeline, it's Eleanor."
"I might have guessed it. You _look_ like Eleanor--you have that Eleanorlook. You know what I mean."
There was a silence as they listened to the rain.
"It's going down my neck, fellow lunatic," she offered finally.
"Answer my questions."
"Well--name of Savage, Eleanor; live in big old house mile down road;nearest living relation to be notified, grandfather--Ramilly Savage;height, five feet four inches; number on watch-case, 3077 W; nose,delicate aquiline; temperament, uncanny--"
"And me," Amory interrupted, "where did you see me?"
"Oh, you're one of _those_ men," she answered haughtily, "must lugold self into conversation. Well, my boy, I was behind a hedge sunningmyself one day last week, and along comes a man saying in a pleasant,conceited way of talking:
"'And now when the night was senescent' (says he) 'And the star dials pointed to morn At the end of the path a liquescent' (says he) 'And nebulous lustre was born.'
"So I poked my eyes up over the hedge, but you had started to run, forsome unknown reason, and so I saw but the back of your beautiful head.'Oh!' says I, 'there's a man for whom many of us might sigh,' and Icontinued in my best Irish--"
"All right," Amory interrupted. "Now go back to yourself."
"Well, I will. I'm one of those people who go through the world givingother people thrills, but getting few myself except those I read intomen on such nights as these. I have the social courage to go on thestage, but not the energy; I haven't the patience to write books; and Inever met a man I'd marry. However, I'm only eighteen."
The storm was dying down softly and only the wind kept up its ghostlysurge and made the stack lean and gravely settle from side to side.Amory was in a trance. He felt that every moment was precious. He hadnever met a girl like this before--she would never seem quite the sameagain. He didn't at all feel like a character in a play, the appropriatefeeling in an unconventional situation--instead, he had a sense ofcoming home.
"I have just made a great decision," said Eleanor after another pause,"and that is why I'm here, to answer another of your questions. I havejust decided that I don't believe in immortality."
"Really! how banal!"
"Frightfully so," she answered, "but depressing with a stale, sicklydepression, nevertheless. I came out here to get wet--like a wet hen;wet hens always have great clarity of mind," she concluded.
"Go on," Amory said politely.
"Well--I'm not afraid of the dark, so I put on my slicker and rubberboots and came out. You see I was always afraid, before, to say I didn'tbelieve in God--because the lightning might strike me--but here I am andit hasn't, of course, but the main point is that this time I wasn't anymore afraid of it than I had been when I was a Christian Scientist, likeI was last year. So now I know I'm a materialist and I was fraternizingwith the hay when you came out and stood by the woods, scared to death."
"Why, you little wretch--" cried Amory indignantly. "Scared of what?"
"_Yourself!_" she shouted, and he jumped. She clapped her hands andlaughed. "See--see! Conscience--kill it like me! Eleanor Savage,materiologist--no jumping, no starting, come early--"
"But I _have_ to have a soul," he objected. "I can't be rational--and Iwon't be molecular."
She leaned toward him, her burning eyes never leaving his own andwhispered with a sort of romantic finality:
"I thought so, Juan, I feared so--you're sentimental. You're not likeme. I'm a romantic little materialist."
"I'm not sentimental--I'm as romantic as you are. The idea, you know, isthat the sentimental person thinks things will last--the romanticperson has a desperate confidence that they won't." (This was an ancientdistinction of Amory's.)
"Epigrams. I'm going home," she said sadly. "Let's get off the haystackand walk to the cross-roads."
They slowly descended from their perch. She would not let him help herdown and motioning him away arrived in a graceful lump in the soft mudwhere she sat for an instant, laughing at herself. Then she jumped toher feet and slipped her hand into his, and they tiptoed across thefields, jumping and swinging from dry spot to dry spot. A transcendentdelight seemed to sparkle in every pool of water, for the moon had risenand the storm had scurried away into western Maryland. When Eleanor'sarm touched his he felt his hands grow cold with deadly fear lest heshould lose the shadow brush with which his imagination was paintingwonders of her. He watched her from the corners of his eyes as ever hedid when he walked with her--she was a feast and a folly and he wishedit had been his destiny to sit forever on a haystack and see lifethrough her green eyes. His paganism soared that night and when shefaded out like a gray ghost down the road, a deep singing came outof the fields and filled his way homeward. All night the summer mothsflitted in and out of Amory's window; all night large looming soundsswayed in mystic revery through the silver grain--and he lay awake inthe clear darkness.
*****
SEPTEMBER
Amory selected a blade of grass and nibbled at it scientifically.
"I never fall in love in August or September," he proffered.
"When then?"
"Christmas or Easter. I'm a liturgist."
"Easter!" She turned up her nose. "Huh! Spring in corsets!"
"Easter _would_ bore spring, wouldn't she? Easter has her hair braided,wears a tailored suit."
"Bind on thy sandals, oh, thou most fleet. Over the splendor and speed of thy feet--"
quoted Eleanor softly, and then added: "I suppose Hallowe'en is a betterday for autumn than Thanksgiving."
"Much better--and Christmas eve does very well for winter, butsummer..."
"Summer has no day," she said. "We can't possibly have a summer love. Somany people have tried that the name's become proverbial. Summer isonly the unfulfilled promise of spring, a charlatan in place of thewarm balmy nights I dream of in April. It's a sad season of life withoutgrowth.... It has no day."
"Fourth of July," Amory suggested facetiously.
"Don't be funny!" she said, raking him with her eyes.
"Well, what could fulfil the promise of spring?"
She thought a moment.
"Oh, I suppose heaven would, if there was one," she said finally, "asort of pagan heaven--you ought to be a materialist," she continuedirrelevantly.
"Why?"
"Because you look a good deal like the pictures of Rupert Brooke."
To some extent Amory tried to play Rupert Brooke as long as he knewEleanor. What he said, his attitude toward life, toward her, towardhimself, were all reflexes of the dead Englishman's literary moods.Often she sat in the grass, a lazy wind playing with her short hair,her voice husky as she ran up and down the scale from Grantchester toWaikiki. There was something most passionate in Eleanor's reading aloud.They seemed nearer, not only mentally, but physically, when they read,than when she was in his arms, and this was often, for they fell halfinto love almost from the first. Yet was Amory capable of love now?He could, as always, run through the emotions in a half hour, but evenwhile they revelled in their imaginations, he knew that neither of themcould care as he had cared once before--I suppose that was why theyturned to Brooke, and Swinburne, and Shelley. Their chance was to makeeverything fine and finished and rich and imaginative; they must bendtiny golden tentacles from his imagination to hers, that would take theplace of the great, d
eep love that was never so near, yet never so muchof a dream.
One poem they read over and over; Swinburne's "Triumph of Time," andfour lines of it rang in his memory afterward on warm nights when he sawthe fireflies among dusky tree trunks and heard the low drone of manyfrogs. Then Eleanor seemed to come out of the night and stand by him,and he heard her throaty voice, with its tone of a fleecy-headed drum,repeating:
"Is it worth a tear, is it worth an hour, To think of things that are well outworn; Of fruitless husk and fugitive flower, The dream foregone and the deed foreborne?"
They were formally introduced two days later, and his aunt told him herhistory. The Ramillys were two: old Mr. Ramilly and his granddaughter,Eleanor. She had lived in France with a restless mother whom Amoryimagined to have been very like his own, on whose death she had come toAmerica, to live in Maryland. She had gone to Baltimore first to staywith a bachelor uncle, and there she insisted on being a debutante atthe age of seventeen. She had a wild winter and arrived in thecountry in March, having quarrelled frantically with all her Baltimorerelatives, and shocked them into fiery protest. A rather fast crowdhad come out, who drank cocktails in limousines and were promiscuouslycondescending and patronizing toward older people, and Eleanor with anesprit that hinted strongly of the boulevards, led many innocentsstill redolent of St. Timothy's and Farmington, into paths of Bohemiannaughtiness. When the story came to her uncle, a forgetful cavalier ofa more hypocritical era, there was a scene, from which Eleanor emerged,subdued but rebellious and indignant, to seek haven with her grandfatherwho hovered in the country on the near side of senility. That's as faras her story went; she told him the rest herself, but that was later.
Often they swam and as Amory floated lazily in the water he shut hismind to all thoughts except those of hazy soap-bubble lands where thesun splattered through wind-drunk trees. How could any one possiblythink or worry, or do anything except splash and dive and loll thereon the edge of time while the flower months failed. Let the days moveover--sadness and memory and pain recurred outside, and here, once more,before he went on to meet them he wanted to drift and be young.
There were days when Amory resented that life had changed from an evenprogress along a road stretching ever in sight, with the scenery mergingand blending, into a succession of quick, unrelated scenes--two years ofsweat and blood, that sudden absurd instinct for paternity that Rosalindhad stirred; the half-sensual, half-neurotic quality of this autumn withEleanor. He felt that it would take all time, more than he could everspare, to glue these strange cumbersome pictures into the scrap-book ofhis life. It was all like a banquet where he sat for this half-hour ofhis youth and tried to enjoy brilliant epicurean courses.
Dimly he promised himself a time where all should be welded together.For months it seemed that he had alternated between being borne along astream of love or fascination, or left in an eddy, and in the eddieshe had not desired to think, rather to be picked up on a wave's top andswept along again.
"The despairing, dying autumn and our love--how well they harmonize!"said Eleanor sadly one day as they lay dripping by the water.
"The Indian summer of our hearts--" he ceased.
"Tell me," she said finally, "was she light or dark?"
"Light."
"Was she more beautiful than I am?"
"I don't know," said Amory shortly.
One night they walked while the moon rose and poured a great burden ofglory over the garden until it seemed fairyland with Amory and Eleanor,dim phantasmal shapes, expressing eternal beauty in curious elfin lovemoods. Then they turned out of the moonlight into the trellised darknessof a vine-hung pagoda, where there were scents so plaintive as to benearly musical.
"Light a match," she whispered. "I want to see you."
Scratch! Flare!
The night and the scarred trees were like scenery in a play, and to bethere with Eleanor, shadowy and unreal, seemed somehow oddly familiar.Amory thought how it was only the past that ever seemed strange andunbelievable. The match went out.
"It's black as pitch."
"We're just voices now," murmured Eleanor, "little lonesome voices.Light another."
"That was my last match."
Suddenly he caught her in his arms.
"You _are_ mine--you know you're mine!" he cried wildly... the moonlighttwisted in through the vines and listened... the fireflies hung upontheir whispers as if to win his glance from the glory of their eyes.
*****
THE END OF SUMMER
"No wind is stirring in the grass; not one wind stirs... the waterin the hidden pools, as glass, fronts the full moon and so intersthe golden token in its icy mass," chanted Eleanor to the trees thatskeletoned the body of the night. "Isn't it ghostly here? If you canhold your horse's feet up, let's cut through the woods and find thehidden pools."
"It's after one, and you'll get the devil," he objected, "and I don'tknow enough about horses to put one away in the pitch dark."
"Shut up, you old fool," she whispered irrelevantly, and, leaning over,she patted him lazily with her riding-crop. "You can leave your old plugin our stable and I'll send him over to-morrow."
"But my uncle has got to drive me to the station with this old plug atseven o'clock."
"Don't be a spoil-sport--remember, you have a tendency toward waveringthat prevents you from being the entire light of my life."
Amory drew his horse up close beside, and, leaning toward her, graspedher hand.
"Say I am--_quick_, or I'll pull you over and make you ride behind me."
She looked up and smiled and shook her head excitedly.
"Oh, do!--or rather, don't! Why are all the exciting things souncomfortable, like fighting and exploring and ski-ing in Canada? Bythe way, we're going to ride up Harper's Hill. I think that comes in ourprogramme about five o'clock."
"You little devil," Amory growled. "You're going to make me stay up allnight and sleep in the train like an immigrant all day to-morrow, goingback to New York."
"Hush! some one's coming along the road--let's go! Whoo-ee-oop!" Andwith a shout that probably gave the belated traveller a series ofshivers, she turned her horse into the woods and Amory followed slowly,as he had followed her all day for three weeks.
The summer was over, but he had spent the days in watching Eleanor, agraceful, facile Manfred, build herself intellectual and imaginativepyramids while she revelled in the artificialities of the temperamentalteens and they wrote poetry at the dinner-table.
When Vanity kissed Vanity, a hundred happy Junes ago, he pondered o'er her breathlessly, and, that all men might ever know, he rhymed her eyes with life and death:
"Thru Time I'll save my love!" he said... yet Beauty vanished with his breath, and, with her lovers, she was dead...
--Ever his wit and not her eyes, ever his art and not her hair:
"Who'd learn a trick in rhyme, be wise and pause before his sonnet there"... So all my words, however true, might sing you to a thousandth June, and no one ever _know_ that you were Beauty for an afternoon.
So he wrote one day, when he pondered how coldly we thought of the "DarkLady of the Sonnets," and how little we remembered her as the great manwanted her remembered. For what Shakespeare _must_ have desired, to havebeen able to write with such divine despair, was that the lady shouldlive... and now we have no real interest in her.... The irony of it isthat if he had cared _more_ for the poem than for the lady the sonnetwould be only obvious, imitative rhetoric and no one would ever haveread it after twenty years....
This was the last night Amory ever saw Eleanor. He was leaving in themorning and they had agreed to take a long farewell trot by the coldmoonlight. She wanted to talk, she said--perhaps the last time in herlife that she could be rational (she meant pose with comfort). So theyhad turned into the woods and rode for half an hour with scarcelya word, except when she whispered "Damn!" at a bothersomebranch--whispered it as no other girl was ever able to whisper it. Thenthey started up Ha
rper's Hill, walking their tired horses.
"Good Lord! It's quiet here!" whispered Eleanor; "much more lonesomethan the woods."
"I hate woods," Amory said, shuddering. "Any kind of foliage orunderbrush 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 edgeof the cliff knew few footsteps at any time. Only an occasional negrocabin, silver-gray in the rock-ribbed moonlight, broke the long line ofbare ground; behind lay the black edge of the woods like a dark frostingon white cake, and ahead the sharp, high horizon. It was much colder--socold that it settled on them and drove all the warm nights from theirminds.
"The end of summer," said Eleanor softly. "Listen to the beat of ourhorses' hoofs--'tump-tump-tump-a-tump.' Have you ever been feverishand had all noises divide into 'tump-tump-tump' until you could sweareternity was divisible into so many tumps? That's the way I feel--oldhorses go tump-tump.... I guess that's the only thing that separateshorses 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 andshivered.
"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 wickedby making me realize my own sins."
They were riding up close by the cliff and Amory gazed over. Where thefall met the ground a hundred feet below, a black stream made a sharpline, broken by tiny glints in the swift water.
"Rotten, rotten old world," broke out Eleanor suddenly, "and thewretchedest thing of all is me--oh, _why_ am I a girl? Why am I not astupid--? 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 ofsentiment, and you can do anything and be justified--and here am I withthe brains to do everything, yet tied to the sinking ship of futurematrimony. If I were born a hundred years from now, well and good, butnow 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 theirlevel and let them patronize my intellect in order to get theirattention. Every year that I don't marry I've got less chance for afirst-class man. At the best I can have my choice from one or two citiesand, of course, I have to marry into a dinner-coat.
"Listen," she leaned close again, "I like clever men and good-lookingmen, 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 onFreud and all that, but it's rotten that every bit of _real_ love inthe world is ninety-nine per cent passion and one little soupcon ofjealousy." She finished as suddenly as she began.
"Of course, you're right," Amory agreed. "It's a rather unpleasantoverpowering force that's part of the machinery under everything. It'slike an actor that lets you see his mechanics! Wait a minute till Ithink this out...."
He paused and tried to get a metaphor. They had turned the cliff andwere riding along the road about fifty feet to the left.
"You see every one's got to have some cloak to throw around it. Themediocre intellects, Plato's second class, use the remnants of romanticchivalry diluted with Victorian sentiment--and we who consider ourselvesthe intellectuals cover it up by pretending that it's another side ofus, has nothing to do with our shining brains; we pretend that the factthat we realize it is really absolving us from being a prey to it. Butthe 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 isno protection from sex any more than convention is..."
"What is?" she fired up. "The Catholic Church or the maxims ofConfucius?"
Amory looked up, rather taken aback.
"That's your panacea, isn't it?" she cried. "Oh, you're just an oldhypocrite, too. Thousands of scowling priests keeping the degenerateItalians and illiterate Irish repentant with gabble-gabble about thesixth and ninth commandments. It's just all cloaks, sentiment andspiritual rouge and panaceas. I'll tell you there is no God, not evena definite abstract goodness; so it's all got to be worked out for theindividual by the individual here in high white foreheads like mine, andyou're too much the prig to admit it." She let go her reins and shookher 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 saidsharply. His materialism, always a thin cloak, was torn to shreds byEleanor's blasphemy.... She knew it and it angered him that she knew it.
"And like most intellectuals who don't find faith convenient," hecontinued coldly, "like Napoleon and Oscar Wilde and the rest of yourtype, 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 hadturned and was riding breakneck for the end of the plateau.
He wheeled and started after her, his body like ice, his nerves in avast clangor. There was no chance of stopping her. The moon was under acloud and her horse would step blindly over. Then some ten feet fromthe edge of the cliff she gave a sudden shriek and flung herselfsideways--plunged from her horse and, rolling over twice, landed ina pile of brush five feet from the edge. The horse went over with afrantic whinny. In a minute he was by Eleanor's side and saw that hereyes were open.
"Eleanor!" he cried.
She did not answer, but her lips moved and her eyes filled with suddentears.
"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. Sothey 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 thingslike 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 lovewaned slowly with the moon. At her door they started from habit to kissgood night, but she could not run into his arms, nor were they stretchedto meet her as in the week before. For a minute they stood there, hatingeach other with a bitter sadness. But as Amory had loved himself inEleanor, so now what he hated was only a mirror. Their poses were strewnabout the pale dawn like broken glass. The stars were long gone andthere were left only the little sighing gusts of wind and the silencesbetween... but naked souls are poor things ever, and soon he turnedhomeward 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..."
This Side of Paradise Page 8
