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 tonight, 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