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

like this place,” Amory said sulkily, “and I don’t want any food.”

Phoebe reappeared with sandwiches, brandy bottle, siphon, and four glasses.

“Amory, pour ’em out,” she said, “and we’ll drink to Fred Sloane, who has a rare, distinguished edge.”

“Yes,” said Axia, coming in, “and Amory. I like Amory.” She sat down beside him and laid her yellow head on his shoulder.

“I’ll pour,” said Sloane; “you use siphon, Phoebe.”

They filled the tray with glasses.

“Ready, here she goes!”

Amory hesitated, glass in hand.

There was a minute while temptation crept over him like a warm wind, and his imagination turned to fire, and he took the glass from Phoebe’s hand. That was all; for at the second that his decision came, he looked up and saw, ten yards from him, the man who had been in the café, and with his jump of astonishment the glass fell from his uplifted hand. There the man half sat, half leaned against a pile of pillows on the corner divan. His face was cast in the same yellow wax as in the café, neither the dull, pasty color of a dead man⁠—rather a sort of virile pallor⁠—nor unhealthy, you’d have called it; but like a strong man who’d worked in a mine or done night shifts in a damp climate. Amory looked him over carefully and later he could have drawn him after a fashion, down to the merest details. His mouth was the kind that is called frank, and he had steady gray eyes that moved slowly from one to the other of their group, with just the shade of a questioning expression. Amory noticed his hands; they weren’t fine at all, but they had versatility and a tenuous strength⁠ ⁠… they were nervous hands that sat lightly along the cushions and moved constantly with little jerky openings and closings. Then, suddenly, Amory perceived the feet, and with a rush of blood to the head he realized he was afraid. The feet were all wrong⁠ ⁠… with a sort of wrongness that he felt rather than knew.⁠ ⁠… It was like weakness in a good woman, or blood on satin; one of those terrible incongruities that shake little things in the back of the brain. He wore no shoes, but, instead, a sort of half moccasin, pointed, though, like the shoes they wore in the fourteenth century, and with the little ends curling up. They were a darkish brown and his toes seemed to fill them to the end.⁠ ⁠… They were unutterably terrible.⁠ ⁠…

He must have said something, or looked something, for Axia’s voice came out of the void with a strange goodness.

“Well, look at Amory! Poor old Amory’s sick⁠—old head going ’round?”

“Look at that man!” cried Amory, pointing toward the corner divan.

“You mean that purple zebra!” shrieked Axia facetiously. “Ooo-ee! Amory’s got a purple zebra watching him!”

Sloane laughed vacantly.

“Ole zebra gotcha, Amory?”

There was a silence.⁠ ⁠… The man regarded Amory quizzically.⁠ ⁠… Then the human voices fell faintly on his ear:

“Thought you weren’t drinking,” remarked Axia sardonically, but her voice was good to hear; the whole divan that held the man was alive; alive like heat waves over asphalt, like wriggling worms.⁠ ⁠…

“Come back! Come back!” Axia’s arm fell on his. “Amory, dear, you aren’t going, Amory!” He was halfway to the door.

“Come on, Amory, stick ’th us!”

“Sick, are you?”

“Sit down a second!”

“Take some water.”

“Take a little brandy.⁠ ⁠…”

The elevator was close, and the colored boy was half asleep, paled to a livid bronze⁠ ⁠… Axia’s beseeching voice floated down the shaft. Those feet⁠ ⁠… those feet⁠ ⁠…

As they settled to the lower floor the feet came into view in the sickly electric light of the paved hall.

In the Alley

Down the long street came the moon, and Amory turned his back on it and walked. Ten, fifteen steps away sounded the footsteps. They were like a slow dripping, with just the slightest insistence in their fall. Amory’s shadow lay, perhaps, ten feet ahead of him, and soft shoes was presumably that far behind. With the instinct of a child Amory edged in under the blue darkness of the white buildings, cleaving the moonlight for haggard seconds, once bursting into a slow run with clumsy stumblings. After that he stopped suddenly; he must keep hold, he thought. His lips were dry and he licked them.

If he met anyone good⁠—were there any good people left in the world or did they all live in white apartment-houses now? Was everyone followed in the moonlight? But if he met someone good who’d know what he meant and hear this damned scuffle⁠ ⁠… then the scuffling grew suddenly nearer, and a black cloud settled over the moon. When again the pale sheen skimmed the cornices, it was almost beside him, and Amory thought he heard a quiet breathing. Suddenly he realized that the footsteps were not behind, had never been behind, they were ahead and he was not eluding but following⁠ ⁠… following. He began to run, blindly, his heart knocking heavily, his hands clinched. Far ahead a black dot showed itself, resolved slowly into a human shape. But Amory was beyond that now; he turned off the street and darted into an alley, narrow and dark and smelling of old rottenness. He twisted down a long, sinuous blackness, where the moonlight was shut away except for tiny glints and patches⁠ ⁠… then suddenly sank panting into a corner by a fence, exhausted. The steps ahead stopped, and he could hear them shift slightly with a continuous motion, like waves around a dock.

He put his face in his hands and covered eyes and ears as well as he could. During all this time it never occurred to him that he was delirious or drunk. He had a sense of reality such as material things could never give him. His intellectual content seemed to submit passively to it, and it fitted like a glove everything that had ever preceded it in his life. It did not muddle him. It was like a problem whose answer he knew on paper, yet whose solution he was