I want the pleasure of losing it again.
Q.—Where are you drifting?
This dialogue merged grotesquely into his mind’s most familiar state—a grotesque blending of desires, worries, exterior impressions and physical reactions.
One Hundred and Twenty-seventh Street—or One Hundred and Thirty-seventh Street....
Two and three look alike—no, not much.
Seat damp ... are clothes absorbing wetness from seat, or seat absorbing dryness from clothes? ...
Sitting on wet substance gave appendicitis, so Froggy Parker’s mother said.
Well, he’d had it—I’ll sue the steamboat company, Beatrice said, and my uncle has a quarter interest—did Beatrice go to heaven? ... probably not—He represented Beatrice’s immortality, also love-affairs of numerous dead men who surely had never thought of him ... if it wasn’t appendicitis, influenza maybe. What?
One Hundred and Twentieth Street?
That must have been One Hundred and Twelfth back there. One O Two instead of One Two Seven.
Rosalind not like Beatrice, Eleanor like Beatrice, only wilder and brainier.
Apartments along here expensive—probably hundred and fifty a month—maybe two hundred.
Uncle had only paid hundred a month for whole great big house in Minneapolis.
Question—were the stairs on the left or right as you came in?
Anyway, in 12 Univee they were straight back and to the left.
What a dirty river—want to go down there and see if it’s dirty—French rivers all brown or black, so were Southern rivers.
Twenty-four dollars meant four hundred and eighty doughnuts.
He could live on it three months and sleep in the park.
Wonder where Jill was—Jill Bayne, Fayne, Sayne—what the devil—neck hurts, darned uncomfortable seat.
No desire to sleep with Jill, what could Alec see in her?
Alec had a coarse taste in women.
Own taste the best; Isabelle, Clara, Rosalind, Eleanor, were all-American.
Eleanor would pitch, probably southpaw.
Rosalind was outfield, wonderful hitter, Clara first base, maybe.
Wonder what Humbird’s body looked like now.
If he himself hadn’t been bayonet instructor he’d have gone up to line three months sooner, probably been killed.
Where’s the darned bell—
The street numbers of Riverside Drive were obscured by the mist and dripping trees from anything but the swiftest scrutiny, but Amory had finally caught sight of one—One Hundred and Twenty-seventh Street.
He got off and with no distinct destination followed a winding, descending sidewalk and came out facing the river, in particular a long pier and a partitioned litter of shipyards for miniature craft: small launches, canoes, rowboats, and catboats.
He turned northward and followed the shore, jumped a small wire fence and found himself in a great disorderly yard adjoining a dock.
The hulls of many boats in various stages of repair were around him; he smelled sawdust and paint and the scarcely distinguishable flat odor of the Hudson.
A man approached through the heavy gloom.
“Hello,” said Amory. “Got a pass?” A mory. “Got a pass!”
“No.
Is this private?”
“This is the Hudson River Sporting and Yacht Club.”
“Oh! I didn’t know.
I’m just resting.”
“Well—” began the man dubiously.
“I’ll go if you want me to.”
The man made non-committal noises in his throat and passed on.
Amory seated himself on an overturned boat and leaned forward thoughtfully until his chin rested in his hand.
“Misfortune is liable to make me a damn bad man,” he said slowly.
In the Drooping Hours
While the rain drizzled on Amory looked futilely back at the stream of his life, all its glitterings and dirty shallows.
To begin with, he was still afraid—not physically afraid any more, but afraid of people and prejudice and misery and monotony.
Yet, deep in his bitter heart, he wondered if he was after all worse than this man or the next.
He knew that he could sophisticate himself finally into saying that his own weakness was just the result of circumstances and environment; that often when he raged at himself as an egotist something would whisper ingratiatingly:
“No. Genius!”
That was one manifestation of fear, that voice which whispered that he could not be both great and good, that genius was the exact combination of those inexplicable grooves and twists in his mind, that any discipline would curb it to mediocrity.