and somewhat contemptible individual. I had never seen personalities act like that before. Usually you either had one or you didn’t. I wonder if I mean personality or temperament or perhaps that brunette alto tenor mood that lies on the borderland…. At any rate my uncle’s mood was now that of a naughty boy to a stern aunt, almost that of a dog to his master.
“You know,” said Mrs. Fulham, “your uncle is the only interesting thing in town. He’s such a perfect fool.”
Uncle George bowed his head and regarded the floor in a speculative manner. He smiled politely, if unhappily.
“That’s your idea.”
“He takes all his spite out on me.”
My uncle nodded. Mrs. Fulham’s partners called over to her that they had lost again and that the game was breaking up. She got rather angry.
“You know,” she said coldly to Uncle George, “you stand there like a trained spaniel letting me say anything I want to you—Do you know what a pitiful thing you are?”
My uncle had gone a dark red. Mrs. Fulham turned again to me.
“I’ve been talking to him like this for ten years—like this or not at all. He’s my little lap dog. Here George, bring me my tea, write a book about me; you’re snippy, Georgie, but interesting.” Mrs. Fulham was rather carried away by the dramatic intensity of her own words and angered by George’s unmovable acceptance. So she lost her head.
“You know,” she said tensely, “my husband often wanted to horsewhip you, but I’ve begged you off. He was very handy in the kennels and always said he could handle any kind of dog!”
Something had snapped. My uncle rose, his eyes blazing. The shift of burden from her to her husband had lifted a weight from his shoulders. His eyes flashed, but the words stored up for ten years came slow and measured.
“Your husband—Do you mean that crooked broker who kept you for five years? Horsewhip me! That was the prattle he may have used around the fireside to keep you under his dirty thumb. By God, I’ll horsewhip your next husband myself.” His voice had risen, and the people were beginning to look up. A hush had fallen on the room, and his words echoed from fireplace to fireplace.
“He’s the damn thief that robbed me of everything in this hellish world!”
He was shouting now. A few men drew near. Women shrank to the corners. Mrs. Fulham stood perfectly still. Her face had gone white, but she was still sneering openly at him.
“What’s this?” He picked up her hand. She tried to snatch it away but he tightened his grip and, twisting the wedding ring off her finger, he threw it on the floor and stamped it into a beaten button of gold.
In a minute I had his arms held. She screamed and held up her broken finger. The crowd closed around us.
In five minutes Uncle George and I were speeding homeward in a taxi. Neither of us spoke; he sat staring straight before him, his green eyes glittering in the dark. I left next morning after breakfast.
* * *
The story ought to end here. My Uncle George should remain with Marc Antony and De Musset as a rather tragic semi-genius, ruined by a woman. Unfortunately the play continues into an inartistic sixth act where it topples over and descends like Uncle George himself in one of his more inebriated states, contrary to all the rules of dramatic literature. One month afterward Uncle George and Mrs. Fulham eloped in the most childish and romantic manner the night before her marriage to the Honorable Howard Bixby was to have taken place. Uncle George never drank again, nor did he ever write or in fact do anything except play a middling amount of golf and get comfortably bored with his wife.
Mother still doubts and predicts gruesome fates for his wife, Father is frankly astonished and not too pleased. In fact I rather believe he enjoyed having an author in the family, even if his books did look a bit decadent on the library table. From time to time I receive subscription lists and invitations from Uncle George. I keep them for use in my new book, “Theories of Genius.” You see, I claim that if Dante had ever won—but a hypothetical sixth act is just as untechnical as a real one.
This Side of Paradise.
New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1920.
… Well this side of Paradise! …
There’s little comfort in the wise.
—Rupert Brooke.
Experience is the name so many people
give to their mistakes.
—Oscar Wilde.
[The text follows the third 1920 printing of the Charles Scribner’s Sons edition. ]
To Sigourney Fay
Book One.
The Romantic Egotist
Chapter 1.
Amory, Son of Beatrice
Amory Blaine inherited from his mother every trait except the stray inexpressible few that made him worth while. His father, an ineffectual, inarticulate man with a taste for Byron and a habit of drowsing over the Encyclopædia Britannica, grew wealthy at thirty through the death of two elder brothers, successful Chicago brokers, and in the first flush of feeling that the world was his, went to Bar Harbor and met Beatrice O’Hara. In consequence, Stephen Blaine handed down to posterity his height of just under six feet and his tendency to waver at crucial moments, these two abstractions appearing in his son Amory. For many years he hovered in the background of his family’s life, an unassertive figure with a face half-obliterated by lifeless, silky hair, continually occupied in “taking care” of his wife, continually harassed by the idea that he didn’t and couldn’t understand her.
But Beatrice Blaine! There was a woman! Early pictures taken on her father’s estate at Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, or in Rome at the Sacred Heart Convent—an educational extravagance that in her youth was only for the daughters of the exceptionally wealthy—showed the exquisite delicacy of her features, the consummate art and simplicity of her clothes. A brilliant education she had—her youth passed in renaissance glory, she was versed in the latest gossip of the Older Roman Families; known by name as a fabulously wealthy American girl to Cardinal Vitori and Queen Margaritta and more subtle celebrities that one must have had some culture even to have heard of. She learned in England to prefer whiskey and soda to wine, and her small talk was broadened in two senses during a winter in Vienna. All in all Beatrice O’Hara absorbed the sort of education that will be quite impossible ever again; a tutelage measured by the number of things and people one could be contemptuous of and charming about; a culture rich in all arts and traditions, barren of all ideas, in the last of those days when the great gardener clipped the inferior roses to produce one perfect bud.
In her less important moments she returned to America, met Stephen Blaine and married him—this almost entirely because she was a little bit weary, a little bit sad. Her only child was carried through a tiresome season and brought into the world on a spring day in ninety-six.
When Amory was five he was already a delightful companion for her. He was an auburn-haired boy, with great, handsome eyes which he would grow up to in time, a facile imaginative mind and a taste for fancy dress. From his fourth to his tenth year he did the country with his mother in her father’s
