This Side of Paradise F. Scott Fitzgerald (mini ebook reader .txt) 📖

voice rising plaintively, “why do I have to come back at all? I’ve learned all that Princeton has to offer. Two years more of mere pedantry and lying around a club aren’t going to help. They’re just going to disorganize me, conventionalize me completely. Even now I’m so spineless that I wonder how I get away with it.”

“Oh, but you’re missing the real point, Tom,” Amory interrupted. “You’ve just had your eyes opened to the snobbishness of the world in a rather abrupt manner. Princeton invariably gives the thoughtful man a social sense.”

“You consider you taught me that, don’t you?” he asked quizzically, eying Amory in the half dark.

Amory laughed quietly.

“Didn’t I?”

“Sometimes,” he said slowly, “I think you’re my bad angel. I might have been a pretty fair poet.”

“Come on, that’s rather hard. You chose to come to an Eastern college. Either your eyes were opened to the mean scrambling quality of people, or you’d have gone through blind, and you’d hate to have done that⁠—been like Marty Kaye.”

“Yes,” he agreed, “you’re right. I wouldn’t have liked it. Still, it’s hard to be made a cynic at twenty.”

“I was born one,” Amory murmured. “I’m a cynical idealist.” He paused and wondered if that meant anything.

They reached the sleeping school of Lawrenceville, and turned to ride back.

“It’s good, this ride, isn’t it?” Tom said presently.

“Yes; it’s a good finish, it’s knockout; everything’s good tonight. Oh, for a hot, languorous summer and Isabelle!”

“Oh, you and your Isabelle! I’ll bet she’s a simple one⁠ ⁠… let’s say some poetry.”

So Amory declaimed “The Ode to a Nightingale” to the bushes they passed.

“I’ll never be a poet,” said Amory as he finished. “I’m not enough of a sensualist really; there are only a few obvious things that I notice as primarily beautiful: women, spring evenings, music at night, the sea; I don’t catch the subtle things like ‘silver-snarling trumpets.’ I may turn out an intellectual, but I’ll never write anything but mediocre poetry.”

They rode into Princeton as the sun was making colored maps of the sky behind the graduate school, and hurried to the refreshment of a shower that would have to serve in place of sleep. By noon the bright-costumed alumni crowded the streets with their bands and choruses, and in the tents there was great reunion under the orange-and-black banners that curled and strained in the wind. Amory looked long at one house which bore the legend “Sixty-nine.” There a few gray-haired men sat and talked quietly while the classes swept by in panorama of life.

Under the Arc-Light

Then tragedy’s emerald eyes glared suddenly at Amory over the edge of June. On the night after his ride to Lawrenceville a crowd sallied to New York in quest of adventure, and started back to Princeton about twelve o’clock in two machines. It had been a gay party and different stages of sobriety were represented. Amory was in the car behind; they had taken the wrong road and lost the way, and so were hurrying to catch up.

It was a clear night and the exhilaration of the road went to Amory’s head. He had the ghost of two stanzas of a poem forming in his mind.⁠ ⁠…

So the gray car crept nightward in the dark and there was no life stirred as it went by.⁠ ⁠… As the still ocean paths before the shark in starred and glittering waterways, beauty-high, the moon-swathed trees divided, pair on pair, while flapping nightbirds cried across the air.⁠ ⁠…
A moment by an inn of lamps and shades, a yellow inn under a yellow moon⁠—then silence, where crescendo laughter fades⁠ ⁠… the car swung out again to the winds of June, mellowed the shadows where the distance grew, then crushed the yellow shadows into blue.⁠ ⁠…

They jolted to a stop, and Amory peered up, startled. A woman was standing beside the road, talking to Alec at the wheel. Afterward he remembered the harpy effect that her old kimono gave her, and the cracked hollowness of her voice as she spoke:

“You Princeton boys?”

“Yes.”

“Well, there’s one of you killed here, and two others about dead.”

“My God!”

“Look!” She pointed and they gazed in horror. Under the full light of a roadside arc-light lay a form, face downward in a widening circle of blood.

They sprang from the car. Amory thought of the back of that head⁠—that hair⁠—that hair⁠ ⁠… and then they turned the form over.

“It’s Dick⁠—Dick Humbird!”

“Oh, Christ!”

“Feel his heart!”

Then the insistent voice of the old crone in a sort of croaking triumph:

“He’s quite dead, all right. The car turned over. Two of the men that weren’t hurt just carried the others in, but this one’s no use.”

Amory rushed into the house and the rest followed with a limp mass that they laid on the sofa in the shoddy little front parlor. Sloane, with his shoulder punctured, was on another lounge. He was half delirious, and kept calling something about a chemistry lecture at 8:10.

“I don’t know what happened,” said Ferrenby in a strained voice. “Dick was driving and he wouldn’t give up the wheel; we told him he’d been drinking too much⁠—then there was this damn curve⁠—oh, my God!⁠ ⁠…” He threw himself face downward on the floor and broke into dry sobs.

The doctor had arrived, and Amory went over to the couch, where someone handed him a sheet to put over the body. With a sudden hardness, he raised one of the hands and let it fall back inertly. The brow was cold but the face not expressionless. He looked at the shoelaces⁠—Dick had tied them that morning. He had tied them⁠—and now he was this heavy white mass. All that remained of the charm and personality of the Dick Humbird he had known⁠—oh, it was all so horrible and unaristocratic and close to the earth. All tragedy has that strain of the grotesque and squalid⁠—so useless, futile⁠ ⁠… the way animals die.⁠ ⁠… Amory was reminded of a cat that had lain horribly mangled in some alley of his childhood.

“Someone go to Princeton with Ferrenby.”

Amory stepped outside the