Suddenly a strange sound fell on his ears. It was a song, in a low, husky voice, a girl’s voice, and whoever was singing was very close to him. A year before he might have laughed, or trembled; but in his restless mood he only stood and listened while the words sank into his consciousness:
“Les sanglots longs
Des violons
De l’automne
Blessent mon coeur
D’une langueur
Monotone.”
The lightning split the sky, but the song went on without a quaver. The girl was evidently in the field and the voice seemed to come vaguely from a haystack about twenty feet in front of him.
Then it ceased: ceased and began again in a weird chant that soared and hung and fell and blended with the rain:
“Tout suffocant
Et bleme quand
Sonne l’heure
Je me souviens
Des jours anciens
Et je pleure....”
“Who the devil is there in RamillyCounty,” muttered Amory aloud, “who would deliver Verlaine in an extemporaneous tune to a soaking haystack?”
“Somebody’s there!” cried the voice unalarmed. “Who are you? — Manfred, St. Christopher, or Queen Victoria?”
“I’m Don Juan!” Amory shouted on impulse, raising his voice above the noise of the rain and the wind.
A delighted shriek came from the haystack.
“I know who you are — you’re the blond boy that likes ‘Ulalume’ — I recognize your voice.”
“How do I get up?” he cried from the foot of the haystack, whither he had arrived, dripping wet. A head appeared over the edge — it was so dark that Amory could just make out a patch of damp hair and two eyes that gleamed like a cat’s.
“Run back!” came the voice, “and jump and I’ll catch your hand — no, not there — on the other side.”
He followed directions and as he sprawled up the side, knee-deep in hay, a small, white hand reached out, gripped his, and helped him onto the top.
“Here you are, Juan,” cried she of the damp hair. “Do you mind if I drop the Don?”
“You’ve got a thumb like mine!” he exclaimed.
“And you’re holding my hand, which is dangerous without seeing my face.” He dropped it quickly.
As if in answer to his prayers came a flash of lightning and he looked eagerly at her who stood beside him on the soggy haystack, ten feet above the ground. But she had covered her face and he saw nothing but a slender figure, dark, damp, bobbed hair, and the small white hands with the thumbs that bent back like his.
“Sit down,” she suggested politely, as the dark closed in on them. “If you’ll sit opposite me in this hollow you can have half of the raincoat, which I was using as a water-proof tent until you so rudely interrupted me.”
“I was asked,” Amory said joyfully; “you asked me — you know you did.”
“Don Juan always manages that,” she said, laughing, “but I shan’t call you that any more, because you’ve got reddish hair. Instead you can recite ‘Ulalume’ and I’ll be Psyche, your soul.”
Amory flushed, happily invisible under the curtain of wind and rain. They were sitting opposite each other in a slight hollow in the hay with the raincoat spread over most of them, and the rain doing for the rest. Amory was trying desperately to see Psyche, but the lightning refused to flash again, and he waited impatiently. Good Lord! supposing she wasn’t beautiful — supposing she was forty and pedantic — heavens! Suppose, only suppose, she was mad. But he knew the last was unworthy. Here had Providence sent a girl to amuse him just as it sent Benvenuto Cellini men to murder, and he was wondering if she was mad, just because she exactly filled his mood.
“I’m not,” she said.
“Not what?”
“Not mad. I didn’t think you were mad when I first saw you, so it isn’t fair that you should think so of me.”
“How on earth — “
As long as they knew each other Eleanor and Amory could be “on a subject” and stop talking with the definite thought of it in their heads, yet ten minutes later speak aloud and find that their minds had followed the same channels and led them each to a parallel idea, an idea that others would have found absolutely unconnected with the first.
“Tell me,” he demanded, leaning forward eagerly, “how do you know about ‘Ulalume’ — how did you know the color of my hair? What’s your name? What were you doing here? Tell me all at once!”
Suddenly the lightning flashed in with a leap of overreaching light and he saw Eleanor, and looked for the first time into those eyes of hers. Oh, she was magnificent — pale skin, the color of marble in starlight, slender brows, and eyes that glittered green as emeralds in the blinding glare. She was a witch, of perhaps nineteen, he judged, alert and dreamy and with the tell-tale white line over her upper lip that was a weakness and a delight. He sank back with a gasp against the wall of hay.
“Now you’ve seen me,” she said calmly, “and I suppose you’re about to say that my green eyes are burning into your brain.”
“What color is your hair?” he asked intently. “It’s bobbed, isn’t it?”
“Yes, it’s bobbed. I don’t know what color it is,” she answered, musing, “so many men have asked me. It’s medium, I suppose — No one ever looks long at my hair. I’ve got beautiful eyes, though, haven’t I. I don’t care what you say, I have beautiful eyes.”
“Answer my question, Madeline.”
“Don’t remember them all — besides my name isn’t Madeline, it’s Eleanor.”
“I might have guessed it. You look like Eleanor — you have that Eleanor look. You know what I mean.”
There was a silence as they listened to the rain.
“It’s going down my neck, fellow lunatic,” she offered finally.
“Answer my questions.”
“Well — name of Savage, Eleanor; live in big old house mile down road; nearest living relation to be notified, grandfather — Ramilly Savage; height, five feet four inches; number on watch-case, 3077 W; nose, delicate aquiline; temperament, uncanny — “
“And me,” Amory interrupted, “where did you see me?”
“Oh, you’re one of those men,” she answered haughtily, “must lug old self into conversation. Well, my boy, I was behind a hedge sunning myself one day last week, and along comes a man saying in a pleasant, conceited way of talking:
“‘And now when the night was senescent’
(says he)
‘And the star dials pointed to morn
At the end of the path a liquescent’
(says he)
‘And nebulous lustre was born.’
“So I poked my eyes up over the hedge, but you had started to run, for some unknown reason, and so I saw but the back of your beautiful head. ‘Oh!’ says I, ‘there’s a man for whom many of us might sigh,’ and I continued in my best Irish — “
“All right,” Amory interrupted. “Now go back to yourself.”
“Well, I will. I’m one of those people who go through the world giving other people thrills, but getting few myself except those I read into men on such nights as these. I have the social courage to go on the stage, but not the energy; I haven’t the patience to write books; and I never met a man I’d marry. However, I’m only eighteen.”
The storm was dying down softly and only the wind kept up its ghostly surge and made the stack lean and gravely settle from side to side. Amory was in a trance. He felt that every moment was precious. He had never met a girl like this before — she would never seem quite the same again. He didn’t at all feel like a character in a play, the appropriate feeling in an unconventional situation — instead, he had a sense of coming home.
“I have just made a great decision,” said Eleanor after another pause, “and that is why I’m here, to answer another of your questions. I have just decided that I don’t believe in immortality.”
“Really! how banal!”
“Frightfully so,” s
he answered, “but depressing with a stale, sickly depression, nevertheless. I came out here to get wet — like a wet hen; wet hens always have great clarity of mind,” she concluded.
“Go on,” Amory said politely.
“Well — I’m not afraid of the dark, so I put on my slicker and rubber boots and came out. You see I was always afraid, before, to say I didn’t believe in God — because the lightning might strike me — but here I am and it hasn’t, of course, but the main point is that this time I wasn’t any more afraid of it than I had been when I was a Christian Scientist, like I was last year. So now I know I’m a materialist and I was fraternizing with the hay when you came out and stood by the woods, scared to death.”
“Why, you little wretch — “ cried Amory indignantly. “Scared of what?”
“Yourself!” she shouted, and he jumped. She clapped her hands and laughed. “See — see! Conscience — kill it like me! Eleanor Savage, materiologist — no jumping, no starting, come early — “
“But I have to have a soul,” he objected. “I can’t be rational — and I won’t be molecular.”
She leaned toward him, her burning eyes never leaving his own and whispered with a sort of romantic finality:
“I thought so, Juan, I feared so — you’re sentimental. You’re not like me. I’m a romantic little materialist.”
“I’m not sentimental — I’m as romantic as you are. The idea, you know, is that the sentimental person thinks things will last — the romantic person has a desperate confidence that they won’t.” (This was an ancient distinction of Amory’s.)
“Epigrams. I’m going home,” she said sadly. “Let’s get off the haystack and walk to the cross-roads.”
They slowly descended from their perch. She would not let him help her down and motioning him away arrived in a graceful lump in the soft mud where she sat for an instant, laughing at herself. Then she jumped to her feet and slipped her hand into his, and they tiptoed across the fields, jumping and swinging from dry spot to dry spot. A transcendent delight seemed to sparkle in every pool of water, for the moon had risen and the storm had scurried away into western Maryland. When Eleanor’s arm touched his he felt his hands grow cold with deadly fear lest he should lose the shadow brush with which his imagination was painting wonders of her. He watched her from the corners of his eyes as ever he did when he walked with her — she was a feast and a folly and he wished it had been his destiny to sit forever on a haystack and see life through her green eyes. His paganism soared that night and when she faded out like a gray ghost down the road, a deep singing came out of the fields and filled his way homeward. All night the summer moths flitted in and out of Amory’s window; all night large looming sounds swayed in mystic revery through the silver grain — and he lay awake in the clear darkness.
SEPTEMBER
Amory selected a blade of grass and nibbled at it scientifically.
“I never fall in love in August or September,” he proffered.
“When then?”
“Christmas or Easter. I’m a liturgist.”
“Easter!” She turned up her nose. “Huh! Spring in corsets!”
“Easter would bore spring, wouldn’t she? Easter has her hair braided, wears a tailored suit.”
“Bind on thy sandals, oh, thou most fleet.
Over the splendor and speed of thy feet — “
quoted Eleanor softly, and then added: “I suppose Hallowe’en is a better day for autumn than Thanksgiving.”
“Much better — and Christmas eve does very well for winter, but summer...”
“Summer has no day,” she said. “We can’t possibly have a summer love. So many people have tried that the name’s become proverbial. Summer is only the unfulfilled promise of spring, a charlatan in place of the warm balmy nights I dream of in April. It’s a sad season of life without growth.... It has no day.”
“Fourth of July,” Amory suggested facetiously.
“Don’t be funny!” she said, raking him with her eyes.
“Well, what could fulfil the promise of spring?”
She thought a moment.
“Oh, I suppose heaven would, if there was one,” she said finally, “a sort of pagan heaven — you ought to be a materialist,” she continued irrelevantly.
“Why?”
“Because you look a good deal like the pictures of Rupert Brooke.”
To some extent Amory tried to play Rupert Brooke as long as he knew Eleanor. What he said, his attitude toward life, toward her, toward himself, were all reflexes of the dead Englishman’s literary moods. Often she sat in the grass, a lazy wind playing with her short hair, her voice husky as she ran up and down the scale from Grantchester to Waikiki. There was something most passionate in Eleanor’s reading aloud. They seemed nearer, not only mentally, but physically, when they read, than when she was in his arms, and this was often, for they fell half into love almost from the first. Yet was Amory capable of love now? He could, as always, run through the emotions in a half hour, but even while they revelled in their imaginations, he knew that neither of them could care as he had cared once before — I suppose that was why they turned to Brooke, and Swinburne, and Shelley. Their chance was to make everything fine and finished and rich and imaginative; they must bend tiny golden tentacles from his imagination to hers, that would take the place of the great, deep love that was never so near, yet never so much of a dream.
One poem they read over and over; Swinburne’s “Triumph of Time,” and four lines of it rang in his memory afterward on warm nights when he saw the fireflies among dusky tree trunks and heard the low drone of many frogs. Then Eleanor seemed to come out of the night and stand by him, and he heard her throaty voice, with its tone of a fleecy-headed drum, repeating:
“Is it worth a tear, is it worth an hour,
To think of things that are well outworn;
Of fruitless husk and fugitive flower,
The dream foregone and the deed foreborne?”
They were formally introduced two days later, and his aunt told him her history. The Ramillys were two: old Mr. Ramilly and his granddaughter, Eleanor. She had lived in France with a restless mother whom Amory imagined to have been very like his own, on whose death she had come to America, to live in Maryland. She had gone to Baltimore first to stay with a bachelor uncle, and there she insisted on being a debutante at the age of seventeen. She had a wild winter and arrived in the country in March, having quarrelled frantically with all her Baltimore relatives, and shocked them into fiery protest. A rather fast crowd had come out, who drank cocktails in limousines and were promiscuously condescending and patronizing toward older people, and Eleanor with an esprit that hinted strongly of the boulevards, led many innocents still redolent of St. Timothy’s and Farmington, into paths of Bohemian naughtiness. When the story came to her uncle, a forgetful cavalier of a more hypocritical era, there was a scene, from which Eleanor emerged, subdued but rebellious and indignant, to seek haven with her grandfather who hovered in the country on the near side of senility. That’s as far as her story went; she told him the rest herself, but that was later.
Often they swam and as Amory floated lazily in the water he shut his mind to all thoughts except those of hazy soap-bubble lands where the sun splattered through wind-drunk trees. How could any one possibly think or worry, or do anything except splash and dive and loll there on the edge of time while the flower months failed. Let the days move over — sadness and memory and pain recurred outside, and here, once more, before he went on to meet them he wanted to drift and be young.
There were days when Amory resented that life had changed from an even progress along a road stretching ever in sight, with the scenery merging and blending, into a succession of quick, unrelated scenes — two years of sweat and blood, that sudden absurd instinct for paternity that Rosalind had stirred; the half-sensual, half-neurotic quality of this autumn with Eleanor. He felt that it would take all time, more than he could ever spare, to glue these strange cumbersome p
ictures into the scrap-book of his life. It was all like a banquet where he sat for this half-hour of his youth and tried to enjoy brilliant epicurean courses.
Dimly he promised himself a time where all should be welded together. For months it seemed that he had alternated between being borne along a stream of love or fascination, or left in an eddy, and in the eddies he had not desired to think, rather to be picked up on a wave’s top and swept along again.
“The despairing, dying autumn and our love — how well they harmonize!” said Eleanor sadly one day as they lay dripping by the water.
“The Indian summer of our hearts — “ he ceased.
“Tell me,” she said finally, “was she light or dark?”
“Light.”
“Was she more beautiful than I am?”
“I don’t know,” said Amory shortly.
One night they walked while the moon rose and poured a great burden of glory over the garden until it seemed fairyland with Amory and Eleanor, dim phantasmal shapes, expressing eternal beauty in curious elfin love moods. Then they turned out of the moonlight into the trellised darkness of a vine-hung pagoda, where there were scents so plaintive as to be nearly musical.
“Light a match,” she whispered. “I want to see you.”
Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald UK (Illustrated) Page 22