When he emerged, rubbing himself lazily with a towel, he found the bar boy with the drinks and had a sudden desire to kid him. On reflection he decided that this would be undignified, so he waved him away.
As the new alcohol tumbled into his stomach and warmed him, the isolated pictures began slowly to form a cinema reel of the day before. Again he saw Rosalind curled weeping among the pillows, again he felt her tears against his cheek. Her words began ringing in his ears: “Don’t ever forget me, Amory—don’t ever forget me—”
“Hell!” he faltered aloud, and then he choked and collapsed on the bed in a shaken spasm of grief. After a minute he opened his eyes and regarded the ceiling.
“Damned fool!” he exclaimed in disgust, and with a voluminous sigh rose and approached the bottle. After another glass he gave way loosely to the luxury of tears. Purposely he called up into his mind little incidents of the vanished spring, phrased to himself emotions that would make him react even more strongly to sorrow.
“We were so happy,” he intoned dramatically, “so very happy.” Then he gave way again and knelt beside the bed, his head half-buried in the pillow.
“My own girl—my own—Oh—”
He clinched his teeth so that the tears streamed in a flood from his eyes.
“Oh… my baby girl, all I had, all I wanted!… Oh, my girl, come back, come back! I need you… need you… we’re so pitiful … just misery we brought each other…. She’ll be shut away from me…. I can’t see her; I can’t be her friend. It’s got to be that way—it’s got to be—”
And then again:
“We’ve been so happy, so very happy….”
He rose to his feet and threw himself on the bed in an ecstasy of sentiment, and then lay exhausted while he realized slowly that he had been very drunk the night before, and that his head was spinning again wildly. He laughed, rose, and crossed again to Lethe….
At noon he ran into a crowd in the Biltmore bar, and the riot began again. He had a vague recollection afterward of discussing French poetry with a British officer who was introduced to him as “Captain Corn, of his Majesty’s Foot,” and he remembered attempting to recite “Clair de Lune” at luncheon; then he slept in a big, soft chair until almost five o’clock when another crowd found and woke him; there followed an alcoholic dressing of several temperaments for the ordeal of dinner. They selected theatre tickets at Tyson’s for a play that had a four-drink programme—a play with two monotonous voices, with turbid, gloomy scenes, and lighting effects that were hard to follow when his eyes behaved so amazingly. He imagined afterward that it must have been “The Jest.”…
… Then the Cocoanut Grove, where Amory slept again on a little balcony outside. Out in Shanley’s, Yonkers, he became almost logical, and by a careful control of the number of high-balls he drank, grew quite lucid and garrulous. He found that the party consisted of five men, two of whom he knew slightly; he became righteous about paying his share of the expense and insisted in a loud voice on arranging everything then and there to the amusement of the tables around him….
Some one mentioned that a famous cabaret star was at the next table, so Amory rose and, approaching gallantly, introduced himself… this involved him in an argument, first with her escort and then with the headwaiter—Amory’s attitude being a lofty and exaggerated courtesy… he consented, after being confronted with irrefutable logic, to being led back to his own table.
“Decided to commit suicide,” he announced suddenly.
“When? Next year?”
“Now. To-morrow morning. Going to take a room at the Commodore, get into a hot bath and open a vein.”
“He’s getting morbid!”
“You need another rye, old boy!”
“We’ll all talk it over to-morrow.”
But Amory was not to be dissuaded, from argument at least.
“Did you ever get that way?” he demanded confidentially fortaccio.
“Sure!”
“Often?”
“My chronic state.”
This provoked discussion. One man said that he got so depressed sometimes that he seriously considered it. Another agreed that there was nothing to live for. “Captain Corn,” who had somehow rejoined the party, said that in his opinion it was when one’s health was bad that one felt that way most. Amory’s suggestion was that they should each order a Bronx, mix broken glass in it, and drink it off. To his relief no one applauded the idea, so having finished his high-ball, he balanced his chin in his hand and his elbow on the table—a most delicate, scarcely noticeable sleeping position, he assured himself—and went into a deep stupor….
He was awakened by a woman clinging to him, a pretty woman, with brown, disarranged hair and dark blue eyes.
“Take me home!” she cried.
“Hello!” said Amory, blinking.
“I like you,” she announced tenderly.
“I like you too.”
He noticed that there was a noisy man in the background and that one of his party was arguing with him.
“Fella I was with’s a damn fool,” confided the blue-eyed woman. “I hate him. I want to go home with you.”
“You drunk?” queried Amory with intense wisdom.
She nodded coyly.
“Go home with him,” he advised gravely. “He brought you.”
At this point the noisy man in the background broke away from his detainers and approached.
“Say!” he said fiercely. “I brought this girl out here and you’re butting in!”
Amory regarded him coldly, while the girl clung to him closer.
“You let go that girl!” cried the noisy man.
Amory tried to make his eyes threatening.
“You go to hell!” he directed finally, and turned his attention to the girl.
“Love first sight,” he suggested.
“I love you,” she breathed and nestled close to him. She did have beautiful eyes.
Some one leaned over and spoke in Amory’s ear.
“That’s just Margaret Diamond. She’s drunk and this fellow here brought her. Better let her go.”
“Let him take care of her, then!” shouted Amory furiously. “I’m no W. Y. C. A. worker, am I?—am I?”
“Let her go!”
“It’s her hanging on, damn it! Let her hang!”
The crowd around the table thickened. For an instant a brawl threatened, but a sleek waiter bent back Margaret Diamond’s fingers until she released her hold on Amory, whereupon she slapped the waiter furiously in the face and flung her arms about her raging original escort.
“Oh, Lord!” cried Amory.
“Let’s go!”
“Come on, the taxis are getting scarce!”
“Check, waiter.”
“C’mon, Amory. Your romance is over.”
Amory laughed.
“You don’t know how true you spoke. No idea. ’At’s the whole trouble.”
AMORY ON THE LABOR QUESTION
Two mornings later he knocked at the president’s door at Bascome and Barlow’s advertising agency.
“Come in!”
Amory entered unsteadily.
“’Morning, Mr. Barlow.”
Mr. Barlow brought his glasses to the inspection and set his mouth slightly ajar that he might better listen.
“Well, Mr. Blaine. We haven’t seen you for several days.”
“No,” said Amory. “I’m quitting.”
“Well—well—this is—”
“I don’t like it here.”
“I’m sorry. I thought our relations had been quite—ah—pleasant. You seemed to be a hard worker—a little inclined perhaps to write fancy copy—”
“I just got tired of it,” interrupted Amory rudely. “It didn’t matter a damn to me whether Harebell’s flour was any better than any one else’s. In fact, I never ate any of it. So I got tired of telling people about it—oh, I know I’ve been drinking—”
Mr. Barlow’s face steeled by several ingots of expression.
“You asked for a position—”
Amory waved him to silence.
“And I think I was rottenly underpaid. Thirty-five dollars a week—less than a good carpenter.”
“You had just started. You’d never worked before,” said Mr. Barlow coolly.
“But it took about ten thousand dollars to educate me where I could write your darned stuff for you. Anyway, as far as length of service goes, you’ve got stenographers here you’ve paid fifteen a week for five years.”
“I’m not going to argue with you, sir,” said Mr. Barlow rising.
“Neither am I. I just wanted to tell you I’m quitting.”
They stood for a moment looking at each other impassively and then Amory turned and left the office.
A LITTLE LULL
Four days after that he returned at last to the apartment. Tom was engaged on a book review for The New Democracy on the staff of which he was employed. They regarded each other for a moment in silence.
“Well?”
“Well?”
“Good Lord, Amory, where’d you get the black eye—and the jaw?”
Amory laughed.
“That’s a mere nothing.”
He peeled off his coat and bared his shoulders.
“Look here!”
Tom emitted a low whistle.
“What hit you?”
Amory laughed again.
“Oh, a lot of people. I got beaten up. Fact.” He slowly replaced his shirt. “It was bound to come sooner or later and I wouldn’t have missed it for anything.”
“Who was it?”
“Well, there were some waiters and a couple of sailors and a few stray pedestrians, I guess. It’s the strangest feeling. You ought to get beaten up just for the experience of it. You fall down after a while and everybody sort of slashes in at you before you hit the ground—then they kick you.”
Tom lighted a cigarette.
“I spent a day chasing you all over town, Amory. But you always kept a little ahead of me. I’d say you’ve been on some party.”
Amory tumbled into a chair and asked for a cigarette.
“You sober now?” asked Tom quizzically.
“Pretty sober. Why?”
“Well, Alec has left. His family had been after him to go home and live, so he—”
A spasm of pain shook Amory.
“Too bad.”
“Yes, it is too bad. We’ll have to get some one else if we’re going to stay here. The rent’s going up.”
“Sure. Get anybody. I’ll leave it to you, Tom.”
Amory walked into his bedroom. The first thing that met his glance was a photograph of Rosalind that he had intended to
