Amory

“ Amory didn't care whether anybody listened; he simply longed to talk, and St. George had things to think about. He crossed the terrace to the south, and went back to the very spot where he and Olivia had stood; and there, because the night would have it no other way, he stretched along the broad wall among the vines, and lit his pipe, and lay looking out at sea. Here he was, liberated from the business of "buzzing in a corner, trifling with monosyllables," set upon a field pleasant with hazard and without paths, to move in the primal experiences where words themselves are born. ”

“ George must know; he would think so too.
"Oh, I say," said Amory to himself, "we must put some strength in Jarvo's bones too—poor little brick!"
With that Amory drew the carven stopper, fitted in the little funnel that hung about the neck of the vase, poured a half-finger of the wine in each cup, and lifted one in his hand. But the mere odour was enough to make a man live ten lives, he thought, smiling at his own strange exultation. He must no more than touch it to his lips, for he wanted a clear head for what was coming. ”

“ Whoever heard of a man wrapping himself up in a carpet and being carried by Nubians into his mistress’s presence? Whoever heard of a man’s face launching as much as an upriver punt, let alone fleets and fleets of full-sized ships? And whoever heard of the compelling beauty of a man’s eyes, as he lay on a sofa with one satiny upper-arm upraised, simply making—making—a woman come and kiss him?... It was ridiculous. Amory saw now. ”

“ Amory wondered how people could fail to notice that he was a boy marked for glory, and when faces of the throng turned toward him and ambiguous eyes stared into his, he assumed the most romantic of expressions and walked on the air cushions that lie on the asphalts of fourteen. ”

“ His experience of far less comfortable sleeping-quarters had persuaded him that in this imperfect world a man is entitled to exactly what he can get.
His eyes, nevertheless, did not seek Amory’s. Instead, roving round the room to see if nothing less would serve (leaving him still with the fathomless look in reserve for emergencies) , they fell on the Benares tray and the casts. And as they remained there he suddenly frowned. Amory’s own eyes followed his; [391] and suddenly she felt again that little creeping thrill. A faint colour and warmth, new and pleasurable, came into her cheeks. ”

“ The problem of evil had solidified for Amory into the problem of sex. He was beginning to identify evil with the strong phallic worship in Brooke and the early Wells. Inseparably linked with evil was beauty—beauty, still a constant rising tumult; soft in Eleanor's voice, in an old song at night, rioting deliriously through life like superimposed waterfalls, half rhythm, half darkness. Amory knew that every time he had reached toward it longingly it had leered out at him with the grotesque face of evil. Beauty of great art, beauty of all joy, most of all the beauty of women. ”

“ I feel a sad presentiment that the bright dream is all an illusion, an error. I never before remember to have heard the name of Phillip Amory. My sweet, pure, and gentle Emily has taught me to love all the world; and hatred and contempt are foreign to her nature, and, I trust, to my own. Moreover, she has not an enemy in the wide world, never had, or could have. One might as well war with an angel of heaven as with a creature so holy and lovely as she. ”

“ That’s flat. I see my nights being spent over figures and telegrams and all that sort of thing for some time to come.... Don’t think [482] I’ve forgotten. I understand perfectly. I suppose that sooner or later it will have to be the Continent and so on—but not until this job’s settled. Not till then. Everything else—everything—has got to stand down. You do see, don’t you, Amory? I hope you do.”
As he had talked there had come over Amory a sense of what his love must be if nothing but his relentless sense of duty could frustrate it even for a day. ”

“ We all speak of the world as we find it. This was the world as Amory had found it; and, since the total sum of the world’s wrong and cruelty was admittedly enormous, what more natural than to try to gauge its enormousness by a process of multiplication?
Amory, sternly and deliberately setting her painting aside until she should have come to some really basic conclusion on these points, began to multiply. ”

“ If something of a likeness to Amory herself was to be traced in all these figures, every artist who works in a single room knows how frequently, for lack of pence, he must use himself as a model. It was this picture, of which more later, that enabled Amory to see so clearly the peril that beset Cosimo. ”

“ Therefore it was that Amory looked on Corin and Bonniebell as the precious repositories of her own relinquished joys, and heirs to a happier life than she herself had known. She dreamed over them and their future. Laura Wyron was quite right: by the time they had grown up the fogs of cowardice and prejudice and self-seeking would have disappeared for ever. Perhaps even by that time, as in Heaven, there would be no more marrying nor giving in marriage. Things would have adjusted themselves out of the rarer and sweeter and more liberal atmosphere. ”

“ For so slight a cause, the start that Amory gave was rather heartrending. She stopped dead. Her face had turned so chalky a white that the freckles upon it, which ordinarily scarcely showed, looked almost unwholesome.
In her mind she had given Edgar Strong leave to be cruel to her, but not with this cruelty. The cruelty we choose is always another cruelty. Once a man, who miraculously survived a flogging, said that by comparison with the anguish of the second stroke that of the first was almost a sweetness; and after the third, and fourth, men, they say, have laughed. ”

“ Amory herself would have been the first to confess the weakness that set her wondering how many bedrooms the Shropshire house had, and whether there were rose gardens and fruit trees on the southern walls. Even from thoughts of duty weak mortals must sometimes stoop. Besides, if there was not a village green with a maypole on it, some arrangement would probably have to be made. Amory didn’t think she would want morrice-dancing on the lawn in front of the drawing-room windows, except, of course, on birthdays and festival days and the days when the tenants paid their rent. ”

“ “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 had rather a Puritan conscience. Not that he yielded to it—later in life he almost completely slew it—but at fifteen it made him consider himself a great deal worse than other boys... unscrupulousness... the desire to influence people in almost every way, even for evil... a certain coldness and lack of affection, amounting sometimes to cruelty... a shifting sense of honor... an unholy selfishness... a puzzled, furtive interest in everything concerning sex.
There was, also, a curious strain of weakness running crosswise through his make-up... ”

“ Cosimo gasped.
“Isn’t it?” Amory bore him down, flinging out an adorable arm. “Isn’t it? What is the battle, then, if that isn’t it? What is every woman worth her salt, and a few devoted men, working and suffering and fighting for if it isn’t for that? ”

“ And so, in spite of that curious warm tingle, Amory was not one atom more free, nor one atom less free, to develop (did she wish it) a relationship with anybody else—Edgar Strong or anybody—than she had been before. She saw this perfectly clearly. She had talked it all over with Cosimo scores of times. ”

“ When Amory had said this same thing before, Cosimo had laughed, and with beautiful tact had replied that Dorothy would never have married him: but there was something of the still, of the rapt, about Amory that morning that would have made a laugh an offence. Instead, he said, almost reproachfully, “Oh,—Amory!”
“Why don’t you?” she continued dreamily. “I hope it’s not that mere settling down of opinion that is fatal to real vitality of thought. An idée fixe isn’t an idée at all; it’s a Law that in course of time thoughts become petrified. Then they’ve got to be got fluid again. ”

“ Amory became thirteen, rather tall and slender, and more than ever on to his Celtic mother. He had tutored occasionally—the idea being that he was to “keep up,” at each place “taking up the work where he left off,” yet as no tutor ever found the place he left off, his mind was still in very good shape. ”

“ Strong always became almost languid.
It was inevitable that the man who had thus revealed to her, after a single glance at her, such splendid and unsuspected capacities within herself, should exercise a powerful fascination over Amory. ”

“ Afterward their ghosts played, yet both of them hoped from their souls never to meet. Was it the infinite sadness of her eyes that drew him or the mirror of himself that he found in the gorgeous clarity of her mind? She will have no other adventure like Amory, and if she reads this she will say:
“And Amory will have no other adventure like me.” ”

“ Do you suppose when people die they don't notice any difference, either?"
"What I want to know," said Amory, filling his pipe, "is how it's going to look in print. Think of Crass—digging for head-lines."
St. George rose abruptly. Amory was delicious, especially his drawl; but there were times—
"Print it," he exclaimed, "you might as well try to print the absolute."
Amory nodded.
"Oh, if you're going to be Neoplatonic," he said, "I'm off to hum an Orphic hymn. Isn't it about time for the prince? I want to get out with the camera, while the light is good." ”

“ Amory usually replied, “there are lots of girls; why, you couldn’t find a worse wife than me! What good should I be about a house or nursing a [104] baby?”—“True,” Cosimo would then reply,—thoughtfully yet equably: “but you’re unique, you see. You have your art.”—And that, it always seemed to Amory, was the whole point. An ordinary young man would not have had the perception to recognize her art as the crux of the whole matter. ”

“ Probably more than any concrete vice or failing Amory despised his own personality—he loathed knowing that to-morrow and the thousand days after he would swell pompously at a compliment and sulk at an ill word like a third-rate musician or a first-class actor. ”

“ But whether it was that Amory was in difficulties with her work, or whether her pulse had suddenly bounded at the thought of a party really after her own heart, she threw down her palette.
“Oh no, rather not!” she cried. “I’ll come with you. Just half a minute; I’ll wash my brushes when we come back. How ripping!”
Joyously she snatched down from the hook her porringer hat; her eyes shone as she thrust the enamel-headed pins through it. She had not seen Cosimo for several weeks, the others for months and months, and she was pining, simply pining, for a party that a rational person could enjoy. ”

“ Their shabbiness rather took the shine out of the voluptuousnesses she had tried, and failed, to get upon her canvas. But perhaps there was a fitness in that too. Genius, whether in Art or in Love, is usually poor. If she could be splendid there she could be so anywhere. No doubt heaps and heaps of grand passions had transfigured grimy garrets, and had made of them perfectly ripping backgrounds....
So on an afternoon in mid-January Amory put on her new velvet costume of glaucous sea-holly blue and her new mushroom-white hat, and went down to the “Novum’s” offices in a taxi. ”

“ They can do it about fishing and game; why not about love? Because everything’s in the hands of men, and men think more about fishing and game than they do about these things. Oh, if only a Woman would arise! We should soon see all this altered!”...
“Well, you know I’m heart and soul with you about that, Amory,” Cosimo said, a little uneasily, as if he personally might be included in her arraignment of his sex.
“You!” said Amory, with an intellectually affectionate look of her golden eyes.... “If it weren’t for you, Cosimo, I should despair altogether. Nobody else understands me—nobody. ”

“ It is to be presumed that Miss Blanche Amory had more than one rose in her bouquet, and why should not the kind young creature give out of her superfluity, and make as many partners as possible happy? ”

“ For the second time in his life Amory had had a complete bouleversement and was hurrying into line with his generation. ”

“ Long afterward Amory thought of sophomore spring as the happiest time of his life. His ideas were in tune with life as he found it; he wanted no more than to drift and dream and enjoy a dozen new-found friendships through the April afternoons. ”

“ Amory replied, still smiling. “That would be to be false to everything. It would be an admission. Think how all those people who have been so hideously wrong would instantly be sure they’d been perfectly right all the time! Why, it might just as well have been so!... No, Cosimo, that would be mere weakness—yielding to pressure, and an acknowledgment of that very opinion we hate so. We can’t be on both sides at once, Cosimo. Either we’ve been right or we’ve been wrong, and I know which I think we’ve been. ”

“ "Oh, it isn't that I mind the glittering caste system," admitted Amory. "I like having a bunch of hot cats on top, but gosh, Kerry, I've got to be one of them." ”

“ Then—well, then you’ve simply got ’em.”
“Why not ‘vieillards?’” Amory asked, not very genially.
“I say, Cosimo, I’ll have another cutlet if I may.—Why not ‘vieillards?’ Quite obvious. Men aren’t the interest. I’ve tried men, and you can ask Laura how the bookings went.—But ‘vieilles’ and I’ve got ’em. Really, Amory, you’re getting quite dull if you don’t see that! ”