THE COMPLETE WORKS OF F. SCOTT FITZGERALD. Фрэнсис Скотт Фицджеральд

even chapel lures

      That conscious tolerance of yours,

      That broad and beaming view of truth

      (Including Kant and General Booth…)

      And so from shock to shock you live,

      A hollow, pale affirmative…

      The hour’s up… and roused from rest

      One hundred children of the blest

      Cheat you a word or two with feet

      That down the noisy aisle-ways beat…

      Forget on narrow-minded earth

      The Mighty Yawn that gave you birth.”

       In April, Kerry Holiday left college and sailed for France to enroll in the Lafayette Esquadrille. Amory’s envy and admiration of this step was drowned in an experience of his own to which he never succeeded in giving an appropriate value, but which, nevertheless, haunted him for three years afterward.

       THE DEVIL

      Healy’s they left at twelve and taxied to Bistolary’s. There were Axia Marlowe and Phoebe Column, from the Summer Garden show, Fred Sloane and Amory. The evening was so very young that they felt ridiculous with surplus energy, and burst into the cafe like Dionysian revellers.

      “Table for four in the middle of the floor,” yelled Phoebe. “Hurry, old dear, tell ’em we’re here!”

      “Tell ’em to play ‘Admiration’!” shouted Sloane. “You two order; Phoebe and I are going to shake a wicked calf,” and they sailed off in the muddled crowd. Axia and Amory, acquaintances of an hour, jostled behind a waiter to a table at a point of vantage; there they took seats and watched.

      “There’s Findle Margotson, from New Haven!” she cried above the uproar. “‘Lo, Findle! Whoo-ee!”

      “Oh, Axia!” he shouted in salutation. “C’mon over to our table.” “No!” Amory whispered.

      “Can’t do it, Findle; I’m with somebody else! Call me up tomorrow about one o’clock!”

      Findle, a nondescript man-about-Bisty’s, answered incoherently and turned back to the brilliant blonde whom he was endeavoring to steer around the room.

      “There’s a natural damn fool,” commented Amory.

      “Oh, he’s all right. Here’s the old jitney waiter. If you ask me, I want a double Daiquiri.”

      “Make it four.”

       The crowd whirled and changed and shifted. They were mostly from the colleges, with a scattering of the male refuse of Broadway, and women of two types, the higher of which was the chorus girl. On the whole it was a typical crowd, and their party as typical as any. About three-fourths of the whole business was for effect and therefore harmless, ended at the door of the cafe, soon enough for the five-o’clock train back to Yale or Princeton; about one-fourth continued on into the dimmer hours and gathered strange dust from strange places. Their party was scheduled to be one of the harmless kind. Fred Sloane and Phoebe Column were old friends; Axia and Amory new ones. But strange things are prepared even in the dead of night, and the unusual, which lurks least in the cafe, home of the prosaic and inevitable, was preparing to spoil for him the waning romance of Broadway. The way it took was so inexpressibly terrible, so unbelievable, that afterward he never thought of it as experience; but it was a scene from a misty tragedy, played far behind the veil, and that it meant something definite he knew.

      About one o’clock they moved to Maxim’s, and two found them in Deviniere’s. Sloane had been drinking consecutively and was in a state of unsteady exhilaration, but Amory was quite tiresomely sober; they had run across none of those ancient, corrupt buyers of champagne who usually assisted their New York parties. They were just through dancing and were making their way back to their chairs when Amory became aware that some one at a near-by table was looking at him. He turned and glanced casually… a middle-aged man dressed in a brown sack suit, it was, sitting a little apart at a table by himself and watching their party intently. At Amory’s glance he smiled faintly. Amory turned to Fred, who was just sitting down.

      “Who’s that pale fool watching us?” he complained indignantly.

      “Where?” cried Sloane. “We’ll have him thrown out!” He rose to his feet and swayed back and forth, clinging to his chair. “Where is he?”

      Axia and Phoebe suddenly leaned and whispered to each other across the table, and before Amory realized it they found themselves on their way to the door.

      “Where now?”

      “Up to the flat,” suggested Phoebe. “We’ve got brandy and fizz — and everything’s slow down here tonight.”

      Amory considered quickly. He hadn’t been drinking, and decided that if he took no more, it would be reasonably discreet for him to trot along in the party. In fact, it would be, perhaps, the thing to do in order to keep an eye on Sloane, who was not in a state to do his own thinking. So he took Axia’s arm and, piling intimately into a taxicab, they drove out over the hundreds and drew up at a tall, white-stone apartment-house. … Never would he forget that street…. It was a broad street, lined on both sides with just such tall, white-stone buildings, dotted with dark windows; they stretched along as far as the eye could see, flooded with a bright moonlight that gave them a calcium pallor. He imagined each one to have an elevator and a colored hallboy and a key-rack; each one to be eight stories high and full of three and four room suites. He was rather glad to walk into the cheeriness of Phoebe’s living-room and sink onto a sofa, while the girls went rummaging for food.

      “Phoebe’s great stuff,” confided Sloane, sotto voce.

      “I’m only going to stay half an hour,” Amory said sternly. He wondered if it sounded priggish.

      “Hell y’ say,” protested Sloane. “We’re here now — don’t le’s rush.”

      “I don’t 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 cafe, 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 cafe, 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 …