Amory: (A little hysterically) I can’t give you up! I can’t, that’s all! I’ve got to have you!
Rosalind: (A hard note in her voice) You’re being a baby now.
Amory: (Wildly) I don’t care! You’re spoiling our lives!
Rosalind: I’m doing the wise thing, the only thing.
Amory: Are you going to marry Dawson Ryder?
Rosalind: Oh, don’t ask me. You know I’m old in some ways—in others—well, I’m just a little girl. I like sunshine and pretty things and cheerfulness—and I dread responsibility. I don’t want to think about pots and kitchens and brooms. I want to worry whether my legs will get slick and brown when I swim in the summer.
Amory: And you love me.
Rosalind: That’s just why it has to end. Drifting hurts too much. We can’t have any more scenes like this.
(She draws his ring from her finger and hands it to him. Their eyes blind again with tears.)
Amory: (His lips against her wet cheek) Don’t! Keep it, please—oh, don’t break my heart!
(She presses the ring softly into his hand.)
Rosalind[:] (Brokenly) You’d better go.
Amory: Good-by——
(She looks at him once more, with infinite longing, infinite sadness.)
Rosalind: Don’t ever forget me, Amory——
Amory: Good-by——
(He goes to the door, fumbles for the knob, finds it—she sees him throw back his head—and he is gone. Gone—she half starts from the lounge and then sinks forward on her face into the pillows.)
Rosalind: Oh, God, I want to die! (After a moment she rises and with her eyes closed feels her way to the door. Then she turns and looks once more at the room. Here they had sat and dreamed: that tray she had so often filled with matches for him; that shade that they had discreetly lowered one long Sunday afternoon. Misty-eyed she stands and remembers; she speaks aloud.) Oh, Amory, what have I done to you?
(And deep under the aching sadness that will pass in time, Rosalind feels that she has lost something, she knows not what, she knows not why.)
— ◆ —
Chapter 2.
Experiments in Convalescence
The Knickerbocker Bar, beamed upon by Maxfield Parrish’s jovial, colorful “Old King Cole,” was well crowded. Amory stopped in the entrance and looked at his wrist-watch; he wanted particularly to know the time, for something in his mind that catalogued and classified liked to chip things off cleanly. Later it would satisfy him in a vague way to be able to think “that thing ended at exactly twenty minutes after eight on Thursday, June 10, 1919.” This was allowing for the walk from her house—a walk concerning which he had afterward not the faintest recollection.
He was in rather grotesque condition: two days of worry and nervousness, of sleepless nights, of untouched meals, culminating in the emotional crisis and Rosalind’s abrupt decision—the strain of it had drugged the foreground of his mind into a merciful coma. As he fumbled clumsily with the olives at the free-lunch table, a man approached and spoke to him, and the olives dropped from his nervous hands.
“Well, Amory …”
It was some one he had known at Princeton; he had no idea of the name.
“Hello, old boy—” he heard himself saying.
“Name’s Jim Wilson—you’ve forgotten.”
“Sure, you bet, Jim. I remember.”
“Going to reunion?”
“You know!” Simultaneously he realized that he was not going to reunion.
“Get overseas?”
Amory nodded, his eyes staring oddly. Stepping back to let some one pass, he knocked the dish of olives to a crash on the floor.
“Too bad,” he muttered. “Have a drink?”
Wilson, ponderously diplomatic, reached over and slapped him on the back.
“You’ve had plenty, old boy.”
Amory eyed him dumbly until Wilson grew embarrassed under the scrutiny.
“Plenty, hell!” said Amory finally. “I haven’t had a drink to-day.”
Wilson looked incredulous.
“Have a drink or not?” cried Amory rudely.
Together they sought the bar.
“Rye high.”
“I’ll just take a Bronx.”
Wilson had another; Amory had several more. They decided to sit down. At ten o’clock Wilson was displaced by Carling, class of ’15. Amory, his head spinning gorgeously, layer upon layer of soft satisfaction setting over the bruised spots of his spirit, was discoursing volubly on the war.
“’S a mental was’e,” he insisted with owl-like wisdom. “Two years my life spent inalleshual vacuity. Los’ idealism, got be physcal anmal,” he shook his fist expressively at Old King Cole, “got be Prussian ’bout ev’thing, women ’specially. Use’ be straight ’bout women college. Now don’givadam.” He expressed his lack of principle by sweeping a seltzer bottle with a broad gesture to noisy extinction on the floor, but this did not interrupt his speech. “Seek pleasure where find it for to-morrow die. ’At’s philos’phy for me now on.”
Carling yawned, but Amory, waxing brilliant, continued:
“Use’ wonder ’bout things—people satisfied compromise, fif’y-fif’y att’tude on life. Now don’ wonder, don’ wonder—” He became so emphatic in impressing on Carling the fact that he didn’t wonder that he lost the thread of his discourse and concluded by announcing to the bar at large that he was a “physcal anmal.”
“What are you celebrating, Amory?”
Amory leaned forward confidentially.
“Cel’brating blowmylife. Great moment blow my life. Can’t tell you ’bout it——”
He heard Carling addressing a remark to the bartender:
“Give him a bromo-seltzer.”
Amory shook his head indignantly.
“None that stuff!”
“But listen, Amory, you’re making yourself sick. You’re white as a ghost.”
Amory considered the question. He tried to look at himself in the mirror but even by squinting up one eye could only see as far as the row of bottles behind the bar.
“Like som’n solid. We go get some—some salad.”
He settled his coat with an attempt at nonchalance, but letting go of the bar was too much for him, and he slumped against a chair.
“We’ll go over to Shanley’s,” suggested Carling, offering an elbow.
With this assistance Amory managed to get his legs in motion enough to propel him across Forty-second Street.
Shanley’s was very dim. He was conscious that he was talking in a loud voice, very succinctly and convincingly, he thought, about a desire to crush people under his heel. He consumed three club sandwiches,