This Side of Paradise
by F. Scott Fitzgerald · English · Gutenberg #805 · 539,283 chars · public domain (US)
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Title: This Side of Paradise
Author: F. Scott Fitzgerald
Release date: February 1, 1997 [eBook #805]
Most recently updated: June 22, 2020
Language: English
Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/805
Credits: Produced by David Reed, Ken Reeder, and David Widger
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THIS SIDE OF PARADISE ***
Produced by David Reed, Ken Reeder, and David Widger
[Illustration]
THIS SIDE OF PARADISE
By F. Scott Fitzgerald
... 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.
To SIGOURNEY FAY
CONTENTS
BOOK ONE—The Romantic Egotist
CHAPTER 1. Amory, Son of Beatrice
CHAPTER 2. Spires and Gargoyles
CHAPTER 3. The Egotist Considers
CHAPTER 4. Narcissus Off Duty
INTERLUDE
BOOK TWO—The Education of a Personage
CHAPTER 1. The Debutante
CHAPTER 2. Experiments in Convalescence
CHAPTER 3. Young Irony
CHAPTER 4. The Supercilious Sacrifice
CHAPTER 5. The Egotist Becomes a Personage
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 Encyclopedia 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 Margherita 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 private car, from
Coronado, where his mother became so bored that she had a nervous
breakdown in a fashionable hotel, down to Mexico City, where she
took a mild, almost epidemic consumption. This trouble pleased
her, and later she made use of it as an intrinsic part of her
atmosphere—especially after several astounding bracers.
So, while more or less fortunate little rich boys were defying
governesses on the beach at Newport, or being spanked or tutored
or read to from “Do and Dare,” or “Frank on the Mississippi,”
Amory was biting acquiescent bell-boys in the Waldorf, outgrowing
a natural repugnance to chamber music and symphonies, and
deriving a highly specialized education from his mother.
“Amory.”
“Yes, Beatrice.” (Such a quaint name for his mother; she
encouraged it.)
“Dear, don’t _think_ of getting out of bed yet. I’ve always
suspected that early rising in early life makes one nervous.
Clothilde is having your breakfast brought up.”
“All right.”
“I am feeling very old to-day, Amory,” she would sigh, her face a
rare cameo of pathos, her voice exquisitely modulated, her hands
as facile as Bernhardt’s. “My nerves are on edge—on edge. We must
leave this terrifying place to-morrow and go searching for
sunshine.”
Amory’s penetrating green eyes would look out through tangled
hair at his mother. Even at this age he had no illusions about
her.
“Amory.”
“Oh, _yes_.”
“I want you to take a red-hot bath as hot as you can bear it, and
just relax your nerves. You can read in the tub if you wish.”
She fed him sections of the “Fetes Galantes” before he was ten;
at eleven he could talk glibly, if rather reminiscently, of
Brahms and Mozart and Beethoven. One afternoon, when left alone
in the hotel at Hot Springs, he sampled his mother’s apricot
cordial, and as the taste pleased him, he became quite tipsy.
This was fun for a while, but he essayed a cigarette in his
exaltation, and succumbed to a vulgar, plebeian reaction. Though
this incident horrified Beatrice, it also secretly amused her and
became part of what in a later generation would have been termed
her “line.”
“This son of mine,” he heard her tell a room full of awestruck,
admiring women one day, “is entirely sophisticated and quite
charming—but delicate—we’re all delicate; _here_, you know.” Her
hand was radiantly outlined against her beautiful bosom; then
sinking her voice to a whisper, she told them of the apricot
cordial. They rejoiced, for she was a brave raconteuse, but many
were the keys turned in sideboard locks that night against the
possible defection of little Bobby or Barbara....
These domestic pilgrimages were invariably in state; two maids,
the private car, or Mr. Blaine when available, and very often a
physician. When Amory had the whooping-cough four disgusted
specialists glared at each other hunched around his bed; when he
took scarlet fever the number of attendants, including physicians
and nurses, totalled fourteen. However, blood being thicker than
broth, he was pulled through.
The Blaines were attached to no city. They were the Blaines of
Lake Geneva; they had quite enough relatives to serve in place of
friends, and an enviable standing from Pasadena to Cape Cod. But
Beatrice grew more and more prone to like only new acquaintances,
as there were certain stories, such as the history of her
constitution and its many amendments, memories of her years
abroad, that it was necessary for her to repeat at regular
intervals. Like Freudian dreams, they must be thrown off, else
they would sweep in and lay siege to her nerves. But Beatrice was
critical about American women, especially the floating population
of ex-Westerners.
“They have accents, my dear,” she told Amory, “not Southern
accents or Boston accents, not an accent attached to any
locality, just an accent”—she became dreamy. “They pick up old,
moth-eaten London accents that are down on their luck and have to
be used by some one. They talk as an English butler might after
several years in a Chicago grand-opera company.” She became
almost incoherent—“Suppose—time in every Western woman’s life—she
feels her husband is prosperous enough for her to
have—accent—they try to impress _me_, my dear—”
Though she thought of her body as a mass of frailties, she
considered her soul quite as ill, and therefore important in her
life. She had once been a Catholic, but discovering that priests
were infinitely more attentive when she was in process of losing
or regaining faith in Mother Church, she maintained an
enchantingly wavering attitude. Often she deplored the bourgeois
quality of the American Catholic clergy, and was quite sure that
had she lived in the shadow of the great Continental cathedrals
her soul would still be a thin flame on the mighty altar of Rome.
Still, next to doctors, priests were her favorite sport.
“Ah, Bishop Wiston,” she would declare, “I do not want to talk of
myself. I can imagine the stream of hysterical women fluttering
at your doors, beseeching you to be simpatico”—then after an
interlude filled by the clergyman—“but my mood—is—oddly
dissimilar.”
Only to bishops and above did she divulge her clerical romance.
When she had first returned to her country there had been a
pagan, Swinburnian young man in Asheville, for whose passionate
kisses and unsentimental conversations she had taken a decided
penchant—they had discussed the matter pro and con with an
intellectual romancing quite devoid of sappiness. Eventually she
had decided to marry for background, and the young pagan from
Asheville had gone through a spiritual crisis, joined the
Catholic Church, and was now—Monsignor Darcy.
“Indeed, Mrs. Blaine, he is still delightful company—quite the
cardinal’s right-hand man.”
“Amory will go to him one day, I know,” breathed the beautiful
lady, “and Monsignor Darcy will understand him as he understood
me.”
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. What a few more
years of this life would have made of him is problematical.
However, four hours out from land, Italy bound, with Beatrice,
his appendix burst, probably from too many meals in bed, and
after a series of frantic telegrams to Europe and America, to the
amazement of the passengers the great ship slowly wheeled around
and returned to New York to deposit Amory at the pier. You will
admit that if it was not life it was magnificent.
After the operation Beatrice had a nervous breakdown that bore a
suspicious resemblance to delirium tremens, and Amory was left in
Minneapolis, destined to spend the ensuing two years with his
aunt and uncle. There the crude, vulgar air of Western
civilization first catches him—in his underwear, so to speak.
A KISS FOR AMORY
His lip curled when he read it.
“I am going to have a bobbing party,” it said, “on Thursday, December
the seventeenth, at five o’clock, and I would like it very much if
you could come.
Yours truly,
R.S.V.P. Myra St. Claire.
He had been two months in Minneapolis, and his chief struggle had
been the concealing from “the other guys at school” how
particularly superior he felt himself to be, yet this conviction
was built upon shifting sands. He had shown off one day in French
class (he was in senior French class) to the utter confusion of
Mr. Reardon, whose accent Amory damned contemptuously, and to the
delight of the class. Mr. Reardon, who had spent several weeks in
Paris ten years before, took his revenge on the verbs, whenever
he had his book open. But another time Amory showed off in
history class, with quite disastrous results, for the boys there
were his own age, and they shrilled innuendoes at each other all
the following week:
“Aw—I b’lieve, doncherknow, the Umuricun revolution was _lawgely_
an affair of the middul _clawses_,” or
“Washington came of very good blood—aw, quite good—I b’lieve.”
Amory ingeniously tried to retrieve himself by blundering on
purpose. Two years before he had commenced a history of the
United States which, though it only got as far as the Colonial
Wars, had been pronounced by his mother completely enchanting.
His chief disadvantage lay in athletics, but as soon as he
discovered that it was the touchstone of power and popularity at
school, he began to make furious, persistent efforts to excel in
the winter sports, and with his ankles aching and bending in
spite of his efforts, he skated valiantly around the Lorelie rink
every afternoon, wondering how soon he would be able to carry a
hockey-stick without getting it inexplicably tangled in his
skates.
The invitation to Miss Myra St. Claire’s bobbing party spent the
morning in his coat pocket, where it had an intense physical
affair with a dusty piece of peanut brittle. During the afternoon
he brought it to light with a sigh, and after some consideration
and a preliminary draft in the back of Collar and Daniel’s
“First-Year Latin,” composed an answer:
My dear Miss St. Claire: Your truly charming envitation for the
evening of next Thursday evening was truly delightful to receive this
morning. I will be charm and inchanted indeed to present my
compliments on next Thursday evening. Faithfully,
Amory Blaine.
On Thursday, therefore, he walked pensively along the slippery,
shovel-scraped sidewalks, and came in sight of Myra’s house, on
the half-hour after five, a lateness which he fancied his mother
would have favored. He waited on the door-step with his eyes
nonchalantly half-closed, and planned his entrance with
precision. He would cross the floor, not too hastily, to Mrs. St.
Claire, and say with exactly the correct modulation:
“My _dear_ Mrs. St. Claire, I’m _frightfully_ sorry to be late,
but my maid”—he paused there and realized he would be
quoting—“but my uncle and I had to see a fella—Yes, I’ve met your
enchanting daughter at dancing-school.”
Then he would shake hands, using that slight, half-foreign bow,
with all the starchy little females, and nod to the fellas who
would be standing ’round, paralyzed into rigid groups for mutual
protection.
A butler (one of the three in Minneapolis) swung open the door.
Amory stepped inside and divested himself of cap and coat. He was
mildly surprised not to hear the shrill squawk of conversation
from the next room, and he decided it must be quite formal. He
approved of that—as he approved of the butler.
“Miss Myra,” he said.
To his surprise the butler grinned horribly.
“Oh, yeah,” he declared, “she’s here.” He was unaware that his
failure to be cockney was ruining his standing. Amory considered
him coldly.
“But,” continued the butler, his voice rising unnecessarily,
“she’s the only one what _is_ here. The party’s gone.”
Amory gasped in sudden horror.
“What?”
“She’s been waitin’ for Amory Blaine. That’s you, ain’t it? Her
mother says that if you showed up by five-thirty you two was to
go after ’em in the Packard.”
Amory’s despair was crystallized by the appearance of Myra
herself, bundled to the ears in a polo coat, her face plainly
sulky, her voice pleasant only with difficulty.
“’Lo, Amory.”
“’Lo, Myra.” He had described the state of his vitality.
“Well—you _got_ here, _any_ways.”
“Well—I’ll tell you. I guess you don’t know about the auto
accident,” he romanced.
Myra’s eyes opened wide.
“Who was it to?”
“Well,” he continued desperately, “uncle ’n aunt ’n I.”
“Was any one _killed?_”
Amory paused and then nodded.
“Your uncle?”—alarm.
“Oh, no just a horse—a sorta gray horse.”
At this point the Erse butler snickered.
“Probably killed the engine,” he suggested. Amory would have put
him on the rack without a scruple.
“We’ll go now,” said Myra coolly. “You see, Amory, the bobs were
ordered for five and everybody was here, so we couldn’t wait—”
“Well, I couldn’t help it, could I?”
“So mama said for me to wait till ha’past five. We’ll catch the
bobs before it gets to the Minnehaha Club, Amory.”
Amory’s shredded poise dropped from him. He pictured the happy
party jingling along snowy streets, the appearance of the
limousine, the horrible public descent of him and Myra before
sixty reproachful eyes, his apology—a real one this time. He
sighed aloud.
“What?” inquired Myra.
“Nothing. I was just yawning. Are we going to _surely_ catch up
with ’em before they get there?” He was encouraging a faint hope
that they might slip into the Minnehaha Club and meet the others
there, be found in blasé seclusion before the fire and quite
regain his lost attitude.
“Oh, sure Mike, we’ll catch ’em all right—let’s hurry.”
He became conscious of his stomach. As they stepped into the
machine he hurriedly slapped the paint of diplomacy over a rather
box-like plan he had conceived. It was based upon some
“trade-lasts” gleaned at dancing-school, to the effect that he
was “awful good-looking and _English_, sort of.”
“Myra,” he said, lowering his voice and choosing his words
carefully, “I beg a thousand pardons. Can you ever forgive me?”
She regarded him gravely, his intent green eyes, his mouth, that
to her thirteen-year-old, arrow-collar taste was the quintessence
of romance. Yes, Myra could forgive him very easily.
“Why—yes—sure.”
He looked at her again, and then dropped his eyes. He had lashes.
“I’m awful,” he said sadly. “I’m diff’runt. I don’t know why I
make faux pas. ’Cause I don’t care, I s’pose.” Then, recklessly:
“I been smoking too much. I’ve got t’bacca heart.”
Myra pictured an all-night tobacco debauch, with Amory pale and
reeling from the effect of nicotined lungs. She gave a little
gasp.
“Oh, _Amory_, don’t smoke. You’ll stunt your _growth!_”
“I don’t care,” he persisted gloomily. “I gotta. I got the habit.
I’ve done a lot of things that if my fambly knew”—he hesitated,
giving her imagination time to picture dark horrors—“I went to
the burlesque show last week.”
Myra was quite overcome. He turned the green eyes on her again.
“You’re the only girl in town I like much,” he exclaimed in a
rush of sentiment. “You’re simpatico.”
Myra was not sure that she was, but it sounded stylish though
vaguely improper.
Thick dusk had descended outside, and as the limousine made a
sudden turn she was jolted against him; their hands touched.
“You shouldn’t smoke, Amory,” she whispered. “Don’t you know
that?”
He shook his head.
“Nobody cares.”
Myra hesitated.
“_I_ care.”
Something stirred within Amory.
“Oh, yes, you do! You got a crush on Froggy Parker. I guess
everybody knows that.”
“No, I haven’t,” very slowly.
A silence, while Amory thrilled. There was something fascinating
about Myra, shut away here cosily from the dim, chill air. Myra,
a little bundle of clothes, with strands of yellow hair curling
out from under her skating cap.
“Because I’ve got a crush, too—” He paused, for he heard in the
distance the sound of young laughter, and, peering through the
frosted glass along the lamp-lit street, he made out the dark
outline of the bobbing party. He must act quickly. He reached
over with a violent, jerky effort, and clutched Myra’s hand—her
thumb, to be exact.
“Tell him to go to the Minnehaha straight,” he whispered. “I
wanta talk to you—I _got_ to talk to you.”
Myra made out the party ahead, had an instant vision of her
mother, and then—alas for convention—glanced into the eyes
beside. “Turn down this side street, Richard, and drive straight
to the Minnehaha Club!” she cried through the speaking tube.
Amory sank back against the cushions with a sigh of relief.
“I can kiss her,” he thought. “I’ll bet I can. I’ll _bet_ I can!”
Overhead the sky was half crystalline, half misty, and the night
around was chill and vibrant with rich tension. From the Country
Club steps the roads stretched away, dark creases on the white
blanket; huge heaps of snow lining the sides like the tracks of
giant moles. They lingered for a moment on the steps, and watched
the white holiday moon.
“Pale moons like that one”—Amory made a vague gesture—“make
people mysterieuse. You look like a young witch with her cap off
and her hair sorta mussed”—her hands clutched at her hair—“Oh,
leave it, it looks _good_.”
They drifted up the stairs and Myra led the way into the little
den of his dreams, where a cosy fire was burning before a big
sink-down couch. A few years later this was to be a great stage
for Amory, a cradle for many an emotional crisis. Now they talked
for a moment about bobbing parties.
“There’s always a bunch of shy fellas,” he commented, “sitting at
the tail of the bob, sorta lurkin’ an’ whisperin’ an’ pushin’
each other off. Then there’s always some crazy cross-eyed
girl”—he gave a terrifying imitation—“she’s always talkin’
_hard_, sorta, to the chaperon.”
“You’re such a funny boy,” puzzled Myra.
“How d’y’ mean?” Amory gave immediate attention, on his own
ground at last.
“Oh—always talking about crazy things. Why don’t you come ski-ing
with Marylyn and I to-morrow?”
“I don’t like girls in the daytime,” he said shortly, and then,
thinking this a bit abrupt, he added: “But I like you.” He
cleared his throat. “I like you first and second and third.”
Myra’s eyes became dreamy. What a story this would make to tell
Marylyn! Here on the couch with this _wonderful_-looking boy—the
little fire—the sense that they were alone in the great building—
Myra capitulated. The atmosphere was too appropriate.
“I like you the first twenty-five,” she confessed, her voice
trembling, “and Froggy Parker twenty-sixth.”
Froggy had fallen twenty-five places in one hour. As yet he had
not even noticed it.
But Amory, being on the spot, leaned over quickly and kissed
Myra’s cheek. He had never kissed a girl before, and he tasted
his lips curiously, as if he had munched some new fruit. Then
their lips brushed like young wild flowers in the wind.
“We’re awful,” rejoiced Myra gently. She slipped her hand into
his, her head drooped against his shoulder. Sudden revulsion
seized Amory, disgust, loathing for the whole incident. He
desired frantically to be away, never to see Myra again, never to
kiss any one; he became conscious of his face and hers, of their
clinging hands, and he wanted to creep out of his body and hide
somewhere safe out of sight, up in the corner of his mind.
“Kiss me again.” Her voice came out of a great void.
“I don’t want to,” he heard himself saying. There was another
pause.
“I don’t want to!” he repeated passionately.
Myra sprang up, her cheeks pink with bruised vanity, the great
bow on the back of her head trembling sympathetically.
“I hate you!” she cried. “Don’t you ever dare to speak to me
again!”
“What?” stammered Amory.
“I’ll tell mama you kissed me! I will too! I will too! I’ll tell
mama, and she won’t let me play with you!”
Amory rose and stared at her helplessly, as though she were a new
animal of whose presence on the earth he had not heretofore been
aware.
The door opened suddenly, and Myra’s mother appeared on the
threshold, fumbling with her lorgnette.
“Well,” she began, adjusting it benignantly, “the man at the desk
told me you two children were up here—How do you do, Amory.”
Amory watched Myra and waited for the crash—but none came. The
pout faded, the high pink subsided, and Myra’s voice was placid
as a summer lake when she answered her mother.
“Oh, we started so late, mama, that I thought we might as well—”
He heard from below the shrieks of laughter, and smelled the
vapid odor of hot chocolate and tea-cakes as he silently followed
mother and daughter down-stairs. The sound of the graphophone
mingled with the voices of many girls humming the air, and a
faint glow was born and spread over him:
“Casey-Jones—mounted to the cab-un Casey-Jones—’th his orders in his
hand. Casey-Jones—mounted to the cab-un Took his farewell journey to
the prom-ised land.”
SNAPSHOTS OF THE YOUNG EGOTIST
Amory spent nearly two years in Minneapolis. The first winter he
wore moccasins that were born yellow, but after many applications
of oil and dirt assumed their mature color, a dirty, greenish
brown; he wore a gray plaid mackinaw coat, and a red toboggan
cap. His dog, Count Del Monte, ate the red cap, so his uncle gave
him a gray one that pulled down over his face. The trouble with
this one was that you breathed into it and your breath froze; one
day the darn thing froze his cheek. He rubbed snow on his cheek,
but it turned bluish-black just the same.
The Count Del Monte ate a box of bluing once, but it didn’t hurt
him. Later, however, he lost his mind and ran madly up the
street, bumping into fences, rolling in gutters, and pursuing his
eccentric course out of Amory’s life. Amory cried on his bed.
“Poor little Count,” he cried. “Oh, _poor_ little _Count!_”
After several months he suspected Count of a fine piece of
emotional acting.
Amory and Frog Parker considered that the greatest line in
literature occurred in Act III of “Arsene Lupin.”
They sat in the first row at the Wednesday and Saturday matinees.
The line was:
“If one can’t be a great artist or a great soldier, the next best
thing is to be a great criminal.”
Amory fell in love again, and wrote a poem. This was it:
“Marylyn and Sallee, Those are the girls for me. Marylyn stands
above Sallee in that sweet, deep love.”
He was interested in whether McGovern of Minnesota would make the
first or second All-American, how to do the card-pass, how to do
the coin-pass, chameleon ties, how babies were born, and whether
Three-fingered Brown was really a better pitcher than Christie
Mathewson.
Among other things he read: “For the Honor of the School,”
“Little Women” (twice), “The Common Law,” “Sapho,” “Dangerous Dan
McGrew,” “The Broad Highway” (three times), “The Fall of the
House of Usher,” “Three Weeks,” “Mary Ware, the Little Colonel’s
Chum,” “Gunga Din,” The Police Gazette, and Jim-Jam Jems.
He had all the Henty biasses in history, and was particularly
fond of the cheerful murder stories of Mary Roberts Rinehart.
School ruined his French and gave him a distaste for standard
authors. His masters considered him idle, unreliable and
superficially clever.
He collected locks of hair from many girls. He wore the rings of
several. Finally he could borrow no more rings, owing to his
nervous habit of chewing them out of shape. This, it seemed,
usually aroused the jealous suspicions of the next borrower.
All through the summer months Amory and Frog Parker went each
week to the Stock Company. Afterward they would stroll home in
the balmy air of August night, dreaming along Hennepin and
Nicollet Avenues, through the gay crowd. 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.
Always, after he was in bed, there were voices—indefinite,
fading, enchanting—just outside his window, and before he fell
asleep he would dream one of his favorite waking dreams, the one
about becoming a great half-back, or the one about the Japanese
invasion, when he was rewarded by being made the youngest general
in the world. It was always the becoming he dreamed of, never the
being. This, too, was quite characteristic of Amory.
CODE OF THE YOUNG EGOTIST
Before he was summoned back to Lake Geneva, he had appeared, shy
but inwardly glowing, in his first long trousers, set off by a
purple accordion tie and a “Belmont” collar with the edges
unassailably meeting, purple socks, and handkerchief with a
purple border peeping from his breast pocket. But more than that,
he had formulated his first philosophy, a code to live by, which,
as near as it can be named, was a sort of aristocratic egotism.
He had realized that his best interests were bound up with those
of a certain variant, changing person, whose label, in order that
his past might always be identified with him, was Amory Blaine.
Amory marked himself a fortunate youth, capable of infinite
expansion for good or evil. He did not consider himself a “strong
char’c’ter,” but relied on his facility (learn things sorta
quick) and his superior mentality (read a lotta deep books). He
was proud of the fact that he could never become a mechanical or
scientific genius. From no other heights was he debarred.
Physically.—Amory thought that he was exceedingly handsome. He
was. He fancied himself an athlete of possibilities and a supple
dancer.
Socially.—Here his condition was, perhaps, most dangerous. He
granted himself personality, charm, magnetism, poise, the power
of dominating all contemporary males, the gift of fascinating all
women.
Mentally.—Complete, unquestioned superiority.
Now a confession will have to be made. 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... a harsh phrase from the lips of an older
boy (older boys usually detested him) was liable to sweep him off
his poise into surly sensitiveness, or timid stupidity... he was
a slave to his own moods and he felt that though he was capable
of recklessness and audacity, he possessed neither courage,
perseverance, nor self-respect.
Vanity, tempered with self-suspicion if not self-knowledge, a
sense of people as automatons to his will, a desire to “pass” as
many boys as possible and get to a vague top of the world... with
this background did Amory drift into adolescence.
PREPARATORY TO THE GREAT ADVENTURE
The train slowed up with midsummer languor at Lake Geneva, and
Amory caught sight of his mother waiting in her electric on the
gravelled station drive. It was an ancient electric, one of the
early types, and painted gray. The sight of her sitting there,
slenderly erect, and of her face, where beauty and dignity
combined, melting to a dreamy recollected smile, filled him with
a sudden great pride of her. As they kissed coolly and he stepped
into the electric, he felt a quick fear lest he had lost the
requisite charm to measure up to her.
“Dear boy—you’re _so_ tall... look behind and see if there’s
anything coming...”
She looked left and right, she slipped cautiously into a speed of
two miles an hour, beseeching Amory to act as sentinel; and at
one busy crossing she made him get out and run ahead to signal
her forward like a traffic policeman. Beatrice was what might be
termed a careful driver.
“You _are_ tall—but you’re still very handsome—you’ve skipped the
awkward age, or is that sixteen; perhaps it’s fourteen or
fifteen; I can never remember; but you’ve skipped it.”
“Don’t embarrass me,” murmured Amory.
“But, my dear boy, what odd clothes! They look as if they were a
_set_—don’t they? Is your underwear purple, too?”
Amory grunted impolitely.
“You must go to Brooks’ and get some really nice suits. Oh, we’ll
have a talk to-night or perhaps to-morrow night. I want to tell
you about your heart—you’ve probably been neglecting your
heart—and you don’t _know_.”
Amory thought how superficial was the recent overlay of his own
generation. Aside from a minute shyness, he felt that the old
cynical kinship with his mother had not been one bit broken. Yet
for the first few days he wandered about the gardens and along
the shore in a state of superloneliness, finding a lethargic
content in smoking “Bull” at the garage with one of the
chauffeurs.
The sixty acres of the estate were dotted with old and new summer
houses and many fountains and white benches that came suddenly
into sight from foliage-hung hiding-places; there was a great and
constantly increasing family of white cats that prowled the many
flower-beds and were silhouetted suddenly at night against the
darkening trees. It was on one of the shadowy paths that Beatrice
at last captured Amory, after Mr. Blaine had, as usual, retired
for the evening to his private library. After reproving him for
avoiding her, she took him for a long tete-a-tete in the
moonlight. He could not reconcile himself to her beauty, that was
mother to his own, the exquisite neck and shoulders, the grace of
a fortunate woman of thirty.
“Amory, dear,” she crooned softly, “I had such a strange, weird
time after I left you.”
“Did you, Beatrice?”
“When I had my last breakdown”—she spoke of it as a sturdy,
gallant feat.
“The doctors told me”—her voice sang on a confidential note—“that
if any man alive had done the consistent drinking that I have, he
would have been physically _shattered_, my dear, and in his
_grave_—long in his grave.”
Amory winced, and wondered how this would have sounded to Froggy
Parker.
“Yes,” continued Beatrice tragically, “I had dreams—wonderful
visions.” She pressed the palms of her hands into her eyes. “I
saw bronze rivers lapping marble shores, and great birds that
soared through the air, parti-colored birds with iridescent
plumage. I heard strange music and the flare of barbaric
trumpets—what?”
Amory had snickered.
“What, Amory?”
“I said go on, Beatrice.”
“That was all—it merely recurred and recurred—gardens that
flaunted coloring against which this would be quite dull, moons
that whirled and swayed, paler than winter moons, more golden
than harvest moons—”
“Are you quite well now, Beatrice?”
“Quite well—as well as I will ever be. I am not understood,
Amory. I know that can’t express it to you, Amory, but—I am not
understood.”
Amory was quite moved. He put his arm around his mother, rubbing
his head gently against her shoulder.
“Poor Beatrice—poor Beatrice.”
“Tell me about _you_, Amory. Did you have two _horrible_ years?”
Amory considered lying, and then decided against it.
“No, Beatrice. I enjoyed them. I adapted myself to the
bourgeoisie. I became conventional.” He surprised himself by
saying that, and he pictured how Froggy would have gaped.
“Beatrice,” he said suddenly, “I want to go away to school.
Everybody in Minneapolis is going to go away to school.”
Beatrice showed some alarm.
“But you’re only fifteen.”
“Yes, but everybody goes away to school at fifteen, and I _want_
to, Beatrice.”
On Beatrice’s suggestion the subject was dropped for the rest of
the walk, but a week later she delighted him by saying:
“Amory, I have decided to let you have your way. If you still
want to, you can go to school.”
“Yes?”
“To St. Regis’s in Connecticut.”
Amory felt a quick excitement.
“It’s being arranged,” continued Beatrice. “It’s better that you
should go away. I’d have preferred you to have gone to Eton, and
then to Christ Church, Oxford, but it seems impracticable now—and
for the present we’ll let the university question take care of
itself.”
“What are you going to do, Beatrice?”
“Heaven knows. It seems my fate to fret away my years in this
country. Not for a second do I regret being American—indeed, I
think that a regret typical of very vulgar people, and I feel
sure we are the great coming nation—yet”—and she sighed—“I feel
my life should have drowsed away close to an older, mellower
civilization, a land of greens and autumnal browns—”
Amory did not answer, so his mother continued:
“My regret is that you haven’t been abroad, but still, as you are
a man, it’s better that you should grow up here under the
snarling eagle—is that the right term?”
Amory agreed that it was. She would not have appreciated the
Japanese invasion.
“When do I go to school?”
“Next month. You’ll have to start East a little early to take
your examinations. After that you’ll have a free week, so I want
you to go up the Hudson and pay a visit.”
“To who?”
“To Monsignor Darcy, Amory. He wants to see you. He went to
Harrow and then to Yale—became a Catholic. I want him to talk to
you—I feel he can be such a help—” She stroked his auburn hair
gently. “Dear Amory, dear Amory—”
“Dear Beatrice—”
So early in September Amory, provided with “six suits summer
underwear, six suits winter underwear, one sweater or T shirt,
one jersey, one overcoat, winter, etc.,” set out for New England,
the land of schools.
There were Andover and Exeter with their memories of New England
dead—large, college-like democracies; St. Mark’s, Groton, St.
Regis’—recruited from Boston and the Knickerbocker families of
New York; St. Paul’s, with its great rinks; Pomfret and St.
George’s, prosperous and well-dressed; Taft and Hotchkiss, which
prepared the wealth of the Middle West for social success at
Yale; Pawling, Westminster, Choate, Kent, and a hundred others;
all milling out their well-set-up, conventional, impressive type,
year after year; their mental stimulus the college entrance
exams; their vague purpose set forth in a hundred circulars as
“To impart a Thorough Mental, Moral, and Physical Training as a
Christian Gentleman, to fit the boy for meeting the problems of
his day and generation, and to give a solid foundation in the
Arts and Sciences.”
At St. Regis’ Amory stayed three days and took his exams with a
scoffing confidence, then doubling back to New York to pay his
tutelary visit. The metropolis, barely glimpsed, made little
impression on him, except for the sense of cleanliness he drew
from the tall white buildings seen from a Hudson River steamboat
in the early morning. Indeed, his mind was so crowded with dreams
of athletic prowess at school that he considered this visit only
as a rather tiresome prelude to the great adventure. This,
however, it did not prove to be.
Monsignor Darcy’s house was an ancient, rambling structure set on
a hill overlooking the river, and there lived its owner, between
his trips to all parts of the Roman-Catholic world, rather like
an exiled Stuart king waiting to be called to the rule of his
land. Monsignor was forty-four then, and bustling—a trifle too
stout for symmetry, with hair the color of spun gold, and a
brilliant, enveloping personality. When he came into a room clad
in his full purple regalia from thatch to toe, he resembled a
Turner sunset, and attracted both admiration and attention. He
had written two novels: one of them violently anti-Catholic, just
before his conversion, and five years later another, in which he
had attempted to turn all his clever jibes against Catholics into
even cleverer innuendoes against Episcopalians. He was intensely
ritualistic, startlingly dramatic, loved the idea of God enough
to be a celibate, and rather liked his neighbor.
Children adored him because he was like a child; youth revelled
in his company because he was still a youth, and couldn’t be
shocked. In the proper land and century he might have been a
Richelieu—at present he was a very moral, very religious (if not
particularly pious) clergyman, making a great mystery about
pulling rusty wires, and appreciating life to the fullest, if not
entirely enjoying it.
He and Amory took to each other at first sight—the jovial,
impressive prelate who could dazzle an embassy ball, and the
green-eyed, intent youth, in his first long trousers, accepted in
their own minds a relation of father and son within a half-hour’s
conversation.
“My dear boy, I’ve been waiting to see you for years. Take a big
chair and we’ll have a chat.”
“I’ve just come from school—St. Regis’s, you know.”
“So your mother says—a remarkable woman; have a cigarette—I’m
sure you smoke. Well, if you’re like me, you loathe all science
and mathematics—”
Amory nodded vehemently.
“Hate ’em all. Like English and history.”
“Of course. You’ll hate school for a while, too, but I’m glad
you’re going to St. Regis’s.”
“Why?”
“Because it’s a gentleman’s school, and democracy won’t hit you
so early. You’ll find plenty of that in college.”
“I want to go to Princeton,” said Amory. “I don’t know why, but I
think of all Harvard men as sissies, like I used to be, and all
Yale men as wearing big blue sweaters and smoking pipes.”
Monsignor chuckled.
“I’m one, you know.”
“Oh, you’re different—I think of Princeton as being lazy and
good-looking and aristocratic—you know, like a spring day.
Harvard seems sort of indoors—”
“And Yale is November, crisp and energetic,” finished Monsignor.
“That’s it.”
They slipped briskly into an intimacy from which they never
recovered.
“I was for Bonnie Prince Charlie,” announced Amory.
“Of course you were—and for Hannibal—”
“Yes, and for the Southern Confederacy.” He was rather sceptical
about being an Irish patriot—he suspected that being Irish was
being somewhat common—but Monsignor assured him that Ireland was
a romantic lost cause and Irish people quite charming, and that
it should, by all means, be one of his principal biasses.
After a crowded hour which included several more cigarettes, and
during which Monsignor learned, to his surprise but not to his
horror, that Amory had not been brought up a Catholic, he
announced that he had another guest. This turned out to be the
Honorable Thornton Hancock, of Boston, ex-minister to The Hague,
author of an erudite history of the Middle Ages and the last of a
distinguished, patriotic, and brilliant family.
“He comes here for a rest,” said Monsignor confidentially,
treating Amory as a contemporary. “I act as an escape from the
weariness of agnosticism, and I think I’m the only man who knows
how his staid old mind is really at sea and longs for a sturdy
spar like the Church to cling to.”
Their first luncheon was one of the memorable events of Amory’s
early life. He was quite radiant and gave off a peculiar
brightness and charm. Monsignor called out the best that he had
thought by question and suggestion, and Amory talked with an
ingenious brilliance of a thousand impulses and desires and
repulsions and faiths and fears. He and Monsignor held the floor,
and the older man, with his less receptive, less accepting, yet
certainly not colder mentality, seemed content to listen and bask
in the mellow sunshine that played between these two. Monsignor
gave the effect of sunlight to many people; Amory gave it in his
youth and, to some extent, when he was very much older, but never
again was it quite so mutually spontaneous.
“He’s a radiant boy,” thought Thornton Hancock, who had seen the
splendor of two continents and talked with Parnell and Gladstone
and Bismarck—and afterward he added to Monsignor: “But his
education ought not to be intrusted to a school or college.”
But for the next four years the best of Amory’s intellect was
concentrated on matters of popularity, the intricacies of a
university social system and American Society as represented by
Biltmore Teas and Hot Springs golf-links.
... In all, a wonderful week, that saw Amory’s mind turned inside
out, a hundred of his theories confirmed, and his joy of life
crystallized to a thousand ambitions. Not that the conversation
was scholastic—heaven forbid! Amory had only the vaguest idea as
to what Bernard Shaw was—but Monsignor made quite as much out of
“The Beloved Vagabond” and “Sir Nigel,” taking good care that
Amory never once felt out of his depth.
But the trumpets were sounding for Amory’s preliminary skirmish
with his own generation.
“You’re not sorry to go, of course. With people like us our home
is where we are not,” said Monsignor.
“I _am_ sorry—”
“No, you’re not. No one person in the world is necessary to you
or to me.”
“Well—”
“Good-by.”
THE EGOTIST DOWN
Amory’s two years at St. Regis’, though in turn painful and
triumphant, had as little real significance in his own life as
the American “prep” school, crushed as it is under the heel of
the universities, has to American life in general. We have no
Eton to create the self-consciousness of a governing class; we
have, instead, clean, flaccid and innocuous preparatory schools.
He went all wrong at the start, was generally considered both
conceited and arrogant, and universally detested. He played
football intensely, alternating a reckless brilliancy with a
tendency to keep himself as safe from hazard as decency would
permit. In a wild panic he backed out of a fight with a boy his
own size, to a chorus of scorn, and a week later, in desperation,
picked a battle with another boy very much bigger, from which he
emerged badly beaten, but rather proud of himself.
He was resentful against all those in authority over him, and
this, combined with a lazy indifference toward his work,
exasperated every master in school. He grew discouraged and
imagined himself a pariah; took to sulking in corners and reading
after lights. With a dread of being alone he attached a few
friends, but since they were not among the elite of the school,
he used them simply as mirrors of himself, audiences before which
he might do that posing absolutely essential to him. He was
unbearably lonely, desperately unhappy.
There were some few grains of comfort. Whenever Amory was
submerged, his vanity was the last part to go below the surface,
so he could still enjoy a comfortable glow when “Wookey-wookey,”
the deaf old housekeeper, told him that he was the best-looking
boy she had ever seen. It had pleased him to be the lightest and
youngest man on the first football squad; it pleased him when
Doctor Dougall told him at the end of a heated conference that he
could, if he wished, get the best marks in school. But Doctor
Dougall was wrong. It was temperamentally impossible for Amory to
get the best marks in school.
Miserable, confined to bounds, unpopular with both faculty and
students—that was Amory’s first term. But at Christmas he had
returned to Minneapolis, tight-lipped and strangely jubilant.
“Oh, I was sort of fresh at first,” he told Frog Parker
patronizingly, “but I got along fine—lightest man on the squad.
You ought to go away to school, Froggy. It’s great stuff.”
INCIDENT OF THE WELL-MEANING PROFESSOR
On the last night of his first term, Mr. Margotson, the senior
master, sent word to study hall that Amory was to come to his
room at nine. Amory suspected that advice was forthcoming, but he
determined to be courteous, because this Mr. Margotson had been
kindly disposed toward him.
His summoner received him gravely, and motioned him to a chair.
He hemmed several times and looked consciously kind, as a man
will when he knows he’s on delicate ground.
“Amory,” he began. “I’ve sent for you on a personal matter.”
“Yes, sir.”
“I’ve noticed you this year and I—I like you. I think you have in
you the makings of a—a very good man.”
“Yes, sir,” Amory managed to articulate. He hated having people
talk as if he were an admitted failure.
“But I’ve noticed,” continued the older man blindly, “that you’re
not very popular with the boys.”
“No, sir.” Amory licked his lips.
“Ah—I thought you might not understand exactly what it was
they—ah—objected to. I’m going to tell you, because I
believe—ah—that when a boy knows his difficulties he’s better
able to cope with them—to conform to what others expect of him.”
He a-hemmed again with delicate reticence, and continued: “They
seem to think that you’re—ah—rather too fresh—”
Amory could stand no more. He rose from his chair, scarcely
controlling his voice when he spoke.
“I know—oh, _don’t_ you s’pose I know.” His voice rose. “I know
what they think; do you s’pose you have to _tell_ me!” He paused.
“I’m—I’ve got to go back now—hope I’m not rude—”
He left the room hurriedly. In the cool air outside, as he walked
to his house, he exulted in his refusal to be helped.
“That _damn_ old fool!” he cried wildly. “As if I didn’t _know!_”
He decided, however, that this was a good excuse not to go back
to study hall that night, so, comfortably couched up in his room,
he munched Nabiscos and finished “The White Company.”
INCIDENT OF THE WONDERFUL GIRL
There was a bright star in February. New York burst upon him on
Washington’s Birthday with the brilliance of a long-anticipated
event. His glimpse of it as a vivid whiteness against a deep-blue
sky had left a picture of splendor that rivalled the dream cities
in the Arabian Nights; but this time he saw it by electric light,
and romance gleamed from the chariot-race sign on Broadway and
from the women’s eyes at the Astor, where he and young Paskert
from St. Regis’ had dinner. When they walked down the aisle of
the theatre, greeted by the nervous twanging and discord of
untuned violins and the sensuous, heavy fragrance of paint and
powder, he moved in a sphere of epicurean delight. Everything
enchanted him. The play was “The Little Millionaire,” with George
M. Cohan, and there was one stunning young brunette who made him
sit with brimming eyes in the ecstasy of watching her dance.
“Oh—you—wonderful girl, What a wonderful girl you are—”
sang the tenor, and Amory agreed silently, but passionately.
“All—your—wonderful words Thrill me through—”
The violins swelled and quavered on the last notes, the girl sank
to a crumpled butterfly on the stage, a great burst of clapping
filled the house. Oh, to fall in love like that, to the
languorous magic melody of such a tune!
The last scene was laid on a roof-garden, and the cellos sighed
to the musical moon, while light adventure and facile froth-like
comedy flitted back and forth in the calcium. Amory was on fire
to be an habitui of roof-gardens, to meet a girl who should look
like that—better, that very girl; whose hair would be drenched
with golden moonlight, while at his elbow sparkling wine was
poured by an unintelligible waiter. When the curtain fell for the
last time he gave such a long sigh that the people in front of
him twisted around and stared and said loud enough for him to
hear:
“What a _remarkable_-looking boy!”
This took his mind off the play, and he wondered if he really did
seem handsome to the population of New York.
Paskert and he walked in silence toward their hotel. The former
was the first to speak. His uncertain fifteen-year-old voice
broke in in a melancholy strain on Amory’s musings:
“I’d marry that girl to-night.”
There was no need to ask what girl he referred to.
“I’d be proud to take her home and introduce her to my people,”
continued Paskert.
Amory was distinctly impressed. He wished he had said it instead
of Paskert. It sounded so mature.
“I wonder about actresses; are they all pretty bad?”
“No, _sir_, not by a darn sight,” said the worldly youth with
emphasis, “and I know that girl’s as good as gold. I can tell.”
They wandered on, mixing in the Broadway crowd, dreaming on the
music that eddied out of the cafes. New faces flashed on and off
like myriad lights, pale or rouged faces, tired, yet sustained by
a weary excitement. Amory watched them in fascination. He was
planning his life. He was going to live in New York, and be known
at every restaurant and cafe, wearing a dress-suit from early
evening to early morning, sleeping away the dull hours of the
forenoon.
“Yes, _sir_, I’d marry that girl to-night!”
HEROIC IN GENERAL TONE
October of his second and last year at St. Regis’ was a high
point in Amory’s memory. The game with Groton was played from
three of a snappy, exhilarating afternoon far into the crisp
autumnal twilight, and Amory at quarter-back, exhorting in wild
despair, making impossible tackles, calling signals in a voice
that had diminished to a hoarse, furious whisper, yet found time
to revel in the blood-stained bandage around his head, and the
straining, glorious heroism of plunging, crashing bodies and
aching limbs. For those minutes courage flowed like wine out of
the November dusk, and he was the eternal hero, one with the
sea-rover on the prow of a Norse galley, one with Roland and
Horatius, Sir Nigel and Ted Coy, scraped and stripped into trim
and then flung by his own will into the breach, beating back the
tide, hearing from afar the thunder of cheers... finally bruised
and weary, but still elusive, circling an end, twisting, changing
pace, straight-arming... falling behind the Groton goal with two
men on his legs, in the only touchdown of the game.
THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE SLICKER
From the scoffing superiority of sixth-form year and success
Amory looked back with cynical wonder on his status of the year
before. He was changed as completely as Amory Blaine could ever
be changed. Amory plus Beatrice plus two years in
Minneapolis—these had been his ingredients when he entered St.
Regis’. But the Minneapolis years were not a thick enough overlay
to conceal the “Amory plus Beatrice” from the ferreting eyes of a
boarding-school, so St. Regis’ had very painfully drilled
Beatrice out of him, and begun to lay down new and more
conventional planking on the fundamental Amory. But both St.
Regis’ and Amory were unconscious of the fact that this
fundamental Amory had not in himself changed. Those qualities for
which he had suffered, his moodiness, his tendency to pose, his
laziness, and his love of playing the fool, were now taken as a
matter of course, recognized eccentricities in a star
quarter-back, a clever actor, and the editor of the St. Regis
Tattler: it puzzled him to see impressionable small boys
imitating the very vanities that had not long ago been
contemptible weaknesses.
After the football season he slumped into dreamy content. The
night of the pre-holiday dance he slipped away and went early to
bed for the pleasure of hearing the violin music cross the grass
and come surging in at his window. Many nights he lay there
dreaming awake of secret cafes in Mont Martre, where ivory women
delved in romantic mysteries with diplomats and soldiers of
fortune, while orchestras played Hungarian waltzes and the air
was thick and exotic with intrigue and moonlight and adventure.
In the spring he read “L’Allegro,” by request, and was inspired
to lyrical outpourings on the subject of Arcady and the pipes of
Pan. He moved his bed so that the sun would wake him at dawn that
he might dress and go out to the archaic swing that hung from an
apple-tree near the sixth-form house. Seating himself in this he
would pump higher and higher until he got the effect of swinging
into the wide air, into a fairyland of piping satyrs and nymphs
with the faces of fair-haired girls he passed in the streets of
Eastchester. As the swing reached its highest point, Arcady
really lay just over the brow of a certain hill, where the brown
road dwindled out of sight in a golden dot.
He read voluminously all spring, the beginning of his eighteenth
year: “The Gentleman from Indiana,” “The New Arabian Nights,”
“The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne,” “The Man Who Was Thursday,” which
he liked without understanding; “Stover at Yale,” that became
somewhat of a text-book; “Dombey and Son,” because he thought he
really should read better stuff; Robert Chambers, David Graham
Phillips, and E. Phillips Oppenheim complete, and a scattering of
Tennyson and Kipling. Of all his class work only “L’Allegro” and
some quality of rigid clarity in solid geometry stirred his
languid interest.
As June drew near, he felt the need of conversation to formulate
his own ideas, and, to his surprise, found a co-philosopher in
Rahill, the president of the sixth form. In many a talk, on the
highroad or lying belly-down along the edge of the baseball
diamond, or late at night with their cigarettes glowing in the
dark, they threshed out the questions of school, and there was
developed the term “slicker.”
“Got tobacco?” whispered Rahill one night, putting his head
inside the door five minutes after lights.
“Sure.”
“I’m coming in.”
“Take a couple of pillows and lie in the window-seat, why don’t
you.”
Amory sat up in bed and lit a cigarette while Rahill settled for
a conversation. Rahill’s favorite subject was the respective
futures of the sixth form, and Amory never tired of outlining
them for his benefit.
“Ted Converse? ’At’s easy. He’ll fail his exams, tutor all summer
at Harstrum’s, get into Sheff with about four conditions, and
flunk out in the middle of the freshman year. Then he’ll go back
West and raise hell for a year or so; finally his father will
make him go into the paint business. He’ll marry and have four
sons, all bone heads. He’ll always think St. Regis’s spoiled him,
so he’ll send his sons to day school in Portland. He’ll die of
locomotor ataxia when he’s forty-one, and his wife will give a
baptizing stand or whatever you call it to the Presbyterian
Church, with his name on it—”
“Hold up, Amory. That’s too darned gloomy. How about yourself?”
“I’m in a superior class. You are, too. We’re philosophers.”
“I’m not.”
“Sure you are. You’ve got a darn good head on you.” But Amory
knew that nothing in the abstract, no theory or generality, ever
moved Rahill until he stubbed his toe upon the concrete minutiae
of it.
“Haven’t,” insisted Rahill. “I let people impose on me here and
don’t get anything out of it. I’m the prey of my friends, damn
it—do their lessons, get ’em out of trouble, pay ’em stupid
summer visits, and always entertain their kid sisters; keep my
temper when they get selfish and then they think they pay me back
by voting for me and telling me I’m the ‘big man’ of St. Regis’s.
I want to get where everybody does their own work and I can tell
people where to go. I’m tired of being nice to every poor fish in
school.”
“You’re not a slicker,” said Amory suddenly.
“A what?”
“A slicker.”
“What the devil’s that?”
“Well, it’s something that—that—there’s a lot of them. You’re not
one, and neither am I, though I am more than you are.”
“Who is one? What makes you one?”
Amory considered.
“Why—why, I suppose that the _sign_ of it is when a fellow slicks
his hair back with water.”
“Like Carstairs?”
“Yes—sure. He’s a slicker.”
They spent two evenings getting an exact definition. The slicker
was good-looking or clean-looking; he had brains, social brains,
that is, and he used all means on the broad path of honesty to
get ahead, be popular, admired, and never in trouble. He dressed
well, was particularly neat in appearance, and derived his name
from the fact that his hair was inevitably worn short, soaked in
water or tonic, parted in the middle, and slicked back as the
current of fashion dictated. The slickers of that year had
adopted tortoise-shell spectacles as badges of their slickerhood,
and this made them so easy to recognize that Amory and Rahill
never missed one. The slicker seemed distributed through school,
always a little wiser and shrewder than his contemporaries,
managing some team or other, and keeping his cleverness carefully
concealed.
Amory found the slicker a most valuable classification until his
junior year in college, when the outline became so blurred and
indeterminate that it had to be subdivided many times, and became
only a quality. Amory’s secret ideal had all the slicker
qualifications, but, in addition, courage and tremendous brains
and talents—also Amory conceded him a bizarre streak that was
quite irreconcilable to the slicker proper.
This was a first real break from the hypocrisy of school
tradition. The slicker was a definite element of success,
differing intrinsically from the prep school “big man.”
“THE SLICKER”
1. Clever sense of social values.
2. Dresses well. Pretends that dress is superficial—but knows that it
isn’t.
3. Goes into such activities as he can shine in.
4. Gets to college and is, in a worldly way, successful.
5. Hair slicked.
“THE BIG MAN”
1. Inclined to stupidity and unconscious of social values.
2. Thinks dress is superficial, and is inclined to be careless about
it.
3. Goes out for everything from a sense of duty.
4. Gets to college and has a problematical future. Feels lost without
his circle, and always says that school days were happiest, after all.
Goes back to school and makes speeches about what St. Regis’s boys
are doing.
5. Hair not slicked.
Amory had decided definitely on Princeton, even though he would
be the only boy entering that year from St. Regis’. Yale had a
romance and glamour from the tales of Minneapolis, and St. Regis’
men who had been “tapped for Skull and Bones,” but Princeton drew
him most, with its atmosphere of bright colors and its alluring
reputation as the pleasantest country club in America. Dwarfed by
the menacing college exams, Amory’s school days drifted into the
past. Years afterward, when he went back to St. Regis’, he seemed
to have forgotten the successes of sixth-form year, and to be
able to picture himself only as the unadjustable boy who had
hurried down corridors, jeered at by his rabid contemporaries mad
with common sense.
CHAPTER 2. Spires and Gargoyles
At first Amory noticed only the wealth of sunshine creeping
across the long, green swards, dancing on the leaded
window-panes, and swimming around the tops of spires and towers
and battlemented walls. Gradually he realized that he was really
walking up University Place, self-conscious about his suitcase,
developing a new tendency to glare straight ahead when he passed
any one. Several times he could have sworn that men turned to
look at him critically. He wondered vaguely if there was
something the matter with his clothes, and wished he had shaved
that morning on the train. He felt unnecessarily stiff and
awkward among these white-flannelled, bareheaded youths, who must
be juniors and seniors, judging from the savoir faire with which
they strolled.
He found that 12 University Place was a large, dilapidated
mansion, at present apparently uninhabited, though he knew it
housed usually a dozen freshmen. After a hurried skirmish with
his landlady he sallied out on a tour of exploration, but he had
gone scarcely a block when he became horribly conscious that he
must be the only man in town who was wearing a hat. He returned
hurriedly to 12 University, left his derby, and, emerging
bareheaded, loitered down Nassau Street, stopping to investigate
a display of athletic photographs in a store window, including a
large one of Allenby, the football captain, and next attracted by
the sign “Jigger Shop” over a confectionary window. This sounded
familiar, so he sauntered in and took a seat on a high stool.
“Chocolate sundae,” he told a colored person.
“Double chocolate jiggah? Anything else?”
“Why—yes.”
“Bacon bun?”
“Why—yes.”
He munched four of these, finding them of pleasing savor, and
then consumed another double-chocolate jigger before ease
descended upon him. After a cursory inspection of the
pillow-cases, leather pennants, and Gibson Girls that lined the
walls, he left, and continued along Nassau Street with his hands
in his pockets. Gradually he was learning to distinguish between
upper classmen and entering men, even though the freshman cap
would not appear until the following Monday. Those who were too
obviously, too nervously at home were freshmen, for as each train
brought a new contingent it was immediately absorbed into the
hatless, white-shod, book-laden throng, whose function seemed to
be to drift endlessly up and down the street, emitting great
clouds of smoke from brand-new pipes. By afternoon Amory realized
that now the newest arrivals were taking him for an upper
classman, and he tried conscientiously to look both pleasantly
blasé and casually critical, which was as near as he could
analyze the prevalent facial expression.
At five o’clock he felt the need of hearing his own voice, so he
retreated to his house to see if any one else had arrived. Having
climbed the rickety stairs he scrutinized his room resignedly,
concluding that it was hopeless to attempt any more inspired
decoration than class banners and tiger pictures. There was a tap
at the door.
“Come in!”
A slim face with gray eyes and a humorous smile appeared in the
doorway.
“Got a hammer?”
“No—sorry. Maybe Mrs. Twelve, or whatever she goes by, has one.”
The stranger advanced into the room.
“You an inmate of this asylum?”
Amory nodded.
“Awful barn for the rent we pay.”
Amory had to agree that it was.
“I thought of the campus,” he said, “but they say there’s so few
freshmen that they’re lost. Have to sit around and study for
something to do.”
The gray-eyed man decided to introduce himself.
“My name’s Holiday.”
“Blaine’s my name.”
They shook hands with the fashionable low swoop. Amory grinned.
“Where’d you prep?”
“Andover—where did you?”
“St. Regis’s.”
“Oh, did you? I had a cousin there.”
They discussed the cousin thoroughly, and then Holiday announced
that he was to meet his brother for dinner at six.
“Come along and have a bite with us.”
“All right.”
At the Kenilworth Amory met Burne Holiday—he of the gray eyes was
Kerry—and during a limpid meal of thin soup and anaemic
vegetables they stared at the other freshmen, who sat either in
small groups looking very ill at ease, or in large groups seeming
very much at home.
“I hear Commons is pretty bad,” said Amory.
“That’s the rumor. But you’ve got to eat there—or pay anyways.”
“Crime!”
“Imposition!”
“Oh, at Princeton you’ve got to swallow everything the first
year. It’s like a damned prep school.”
Amory agreed.
“Lot of pep, though,” he insisted. “I wouldn’t have gone to Yale
for a million.”
“Me either.”
“You going out for anything?” inquired Amory of the elder
brother.
“Not me—Burne here is going out for the Prince—the Daily
Princetonian, you know.”
“Yes, I know.”
“You going out for anything?”
“Why—yes. I’m going to take a whack at freshman football.”
“Play at St. Regis’s?”
“Some,” admitted Amory depreciatingly, “but I’m getting so damned
thin.”
“You’re not thin.”
“Well, I used to be stocky last fall.”
“Oh!”
After supper they attended the movies, where Amory was fascinated
by the glib comments of a man in front of him, as well as by the
wild yelling and shouting.
“Yoho!”
“Oh, honey-baby—you’re so big and strong, but oh, so gentle!”
“Clinch!”
“Oh, Clinch!”
“Kiss her, kiss ’at lady, quick!”
“Oh-h-h—!”
A group began whistling “By the Sea,” and the audience took it up
noisily. This was followed by an indistinguishable song that
included much stamping and then by an endless, incoherent dirge.
“Oh-h-h-h-h She works in a Jam Factoree And—that-may-be-all-right
But you can’t-fool-me For I know—DAMN—WELL That she
DON’T-make-jam-all-night! Oh-h-h-h!”
As they pushed out, giving and receiving curious impersonal
glances, Amory decided that he liked the movies, wanted to enjoy
them as the row of upper classmen in front had enjoyed them, with
their arms along the backs of the seats, their comments Gaelic
and caustic, their attitude a mixture of critical wit and
tolerant amusement.
“Want a sundae—I mean a jigger?” asked Kerry.
“Sure.”
They suppered heavily and then, still sauntering, eased back to
12.
“Wonderful night.”
“It’s a whiz.”
“You men going to unpack?”
“Guess so. Come on, Burne.”
Amory decided to sit for a while on the front steps, so he bade
them good night.
The great tapestries of trees had darkened to ghosts back at the
last edge of twilight. The early moon had drenched the arches
with pale blue, and, weaving over the night, in and out of the
gossamer rifts of moon, swept a song, a song with more than a
hint of sadness, infinitely transient, infinitely regretful.
He remembered that an alumnus of the nineties had told him of one
of Booth Tarkington’s amusements: standing in mid-campus in the
small hours and singing tenor songs to the stars, arousing
mingled emotions in the couched undergraduates according to the
sentiment of their moods.
Now, far down the shadowy line of University Place a white-clad
phalanx broke the gloom, and marching figures, white-shirted,
white-trousered, swung rhythmically up the street, with linked
arms and heads thrown back:
“Going back—going back, Going—back—to—Nas-sau—Hall, Going back—going
back— To the—Best—Old—Place—of—All. Going back—going back, From
all—this—earth-ly—ball, We’ll—clear—the—track—as—we—go—back—
Going—back—to—Nas-sau—Hall!”
Amory closed his eyes as the ghostly procession drew near. The
song soared so high that all dropped out except the tenors, who
bore the melody triumphantly past the danger-point and
relinquished it to the fantastic chorus. Then Amory opened his
eyes, half afraid that sight would spoil the rich illusion of
harmony.
He sighed eagerly. There at the head of the white platoon marched
Allenby, the football captain, slim and defiant, as if aware that
this year the hopes of the college rested on him, that his
hundred-and-sixty pounds were expected to dodge to victory
through the heavy blue and crimson lines.
Fascinated, Amory watched each rank of linked arms as it came
abreast, the faces indistinct above the polo shirts, the voices
blent in a paean of triumph—and then the procession passed
through shadowy Campbell Arch, and the voices grew fainter as it
wound eastward over the campus.
The minutes passed and Amory sat there very quietly. He regretted
the rule that would forbid freshmen to be outdoors after curfew,
for he wanted to ramble through the shadowy scented lanes, where
Witherspoon brooded like a dark mother over Whig and Clio, her
Attic children, where the black Gothic snake of Little curled
down to Cuyler and Patton, these in turn flinging the mystery out
over the placid slope rolling to the lake.
Princeton of the daytime filtered slowly into his
consciousness—West and Reunion, redolent of the sixties,
Seventy-nine Hall, brick-red and arrogant, Upper and Lower Pyne,
aristocratic Elizabethan ladies not quite content to live among
shopkeepers, and, topping all, climbing with clear blue
aspiration, the great dreaming spires of Holder and Cleveland
towers.
From the first he loved Princeton—its lazy beauty, its
half-grasped significance, the wild moonlight revel of the
rushes, the handsome, prosperous big-game crowds, and under it
all the air of struggle that pervaded his class. From the day
when, wild-eyed and exhausted, the jerseyed freshmen sat in the
gymnasium and elected some one from Hill School class president,
a Lawrenceville celebrity vice-president, a hockey star from St.
Paul’s secretary, up until the end of sophomore year it never
ceased, that breathless social system, that worship, seldom
named, never really admitted, of the bogey “Big Man.”
First it was schools, and Amory, alone from St. Regis’, watched
the crowds form and widen and form again; St. Paul’s, Hill,
Pomfret, eating at certain tacitly reserved tables in Commons,
dressing in their own corners of the gymnasium, and drawing
unconsciously about them a barrier of the slightly less important
but socially ambitious to protect them from the friendly, rather
puzzled high-school element. From the moment he realized this
Amory resented social barriers as artificial distinctions made by
the strong to bolster up their weak retainers and keep out the
almost strong.
Having decided to be one of the gods of the class, he reported
for freshman football practice, but in the second week, playing
quarter-back, already paragraphed in corners of the Princetonian,
he wrenched his knee seriously enough to put him out for the rest
of the season. This forced him to retire and consider the
situation.
“12 Univee” housed a dozen miscellaneous question-marks. There
were three or four inconspicuous and quite startled boys from
Lawrenceville, two amateur wild men from a New York private
school (Kerry Holiday christened them the “plebeian drunks”), a
Jewish youth, also from New York, and, as compensation for Amory,
the two Holidays, to whom he took an instant fancy.
The Holidays were rumored twins, but really the dark-haired one,
Kerry, was a year older than his blond brother, Burne. Kerry was
tall, with humorous gray eyes, and a sudden, attractive smile; he
became at once the mentor of the house, reaper of ears that grew
too high, censor of conceit, vendor of rare, satirical humor.
Amory spread the table of their future friendship with all his
ideas of what college should and did mean. Kerry, not inclined as
yet to take things seriously, chided him gently for being curious
at this inopportune time about the intricacies of the social
system, but liked him and was both interested and amused.
Burne, fair-haired, silent, and intent, appeared in the house
only as a busy apparition, gliding in quietly at night and off
again in the early morning to get up his work in the library—he
was out for the Princetonian, competing furiously against forty
others for the coveted first place. In December he came down with
diphtheria, and some one else won the competition, but, returning
to college in February, he dauntlessly went after the prize
again. Necessarily, Amory’s acquaintance with him was in the way
of three-minute chats, walking to and from lectures, so he failed
to penetrate Burne’s one absorbing interest and find what lay
beneath it.
Amory was far from contented. He missed the place he had won at
St. Regis’, the being known and admired, yet Princeton stimulated
him, and there were many things ahead calculated to arouse the
Machiavelli latent in him, could he but insert a wedge. The
upper-class clubs, concerning which he had pumped a reluctant
graduate during the previous summer, excited his curiosity: Ivy,
detached and breathlessly aristocratic; Cottage, an impressive
mélange of brilliant adventurers and well-dressed philanderers;
Tiger Inn, broad-shouldered and athletic, vitalized by an honest
elaboration of prep-school standards; Cap and Gown,
anti-alcoholic, faintly religious and politically powerful;
flamboyant Colonial; literary Quadrangle; and the dozen others,
varying in age and position.
Anything which brought an under classman into too glaring a light
was labelled with the damning brand of “running it out.” The
movies thrived on caustic comments, but the men who made them
were generally running it out; talking of clubs was running it
out; standing for anything very strongly, as, for instance,
drinking parties or teetotalling, was running it out; in short,
being personally conspicuous was not tolerated, and the
influential man was the non-committal man, until at club
elections in sophomore year every one should be sewed up in some
bag for the rest of his college career.
Amory found that writing for the Nassau Literary Magazine would
get him nothing, but that being on the board of the Daily
Princetonian would get any one a good deal. His vague desire to
do immortal acting with the English Dramatic Association faded
out when he found that the most ingenious brains and talents were
concentrated upon the Triangle Club, a musical comedy
organization that every year took a great Christmas trip. In the
meanwhile, feeling strangely alone and restless in Commons, with
new desires and ambitions stirring in his mind, he let the first
term go by between an envy of the embryo successes and a puzzled
fretting with Kerry as to why they were not accepted immediately
among the elite of the class.
Many afternoons they lounged in the windows of 12 Univee and
watched the class pass to and from Commons, noting satellites
already attaching themselves to the more prominent, watching the
lonely grind with his hurried step and downcast eye, envying the
happy security of the big school groups.
“We’re the damned middle class, that’s what!” he complained to
Kerry one day as he lay stretched out on the sofa, consuming a
family of Fatimas with contemplative precision.
“Well, why not? We came to Princeton so we could feel that way
toward the small colleges—have it on ’em, more self-confidence,
dress better, cut a swathe—”
“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.”
“But just now, Amory, you’re only a sweaty bourgeois.”
Amory lay for a moment without speaking.
“I won’t be—long,” he said finally. “But I hate to get anywhere
by working for it. I’ll show the marks, don’t you know.”
“Honorable scars.” Kerry craned his neck suddenly at the street.
“There’s Langueduc, if you want to see what he looks like—and
Humbird just behind.”
Amory rose dynamically and sought the windows.
“Oh,” he said, scrutinizing these worthies, “Humbird looks like a
knock-out, but this Langueduc—he’s the rugged type, isn’t he? I
distrust that sort. All diamonds look big in the rough.”
“Well,” said Kerry, as the excitement subsided, “you’re a
literary genius. It’s up to you.”
“I wonder”—Amory paused—“if I could be. I honestly think so
sometimes. That sounds like the devil, and I wouldn’t say it to
anybody except you.”
“Well—go ahead. Let your hair grow and write poems like this guy
D’Invilliers in the Lit.”
Amory reached lazily at a pile of magazines on the table.
“Read his latest effort?”
“Never miss ’em. They’re rare.”
Amory glanced through the issue.
“Hello!” he said in surprise, “he’s a freshman, isn’t he?”
“Yeah.”
“Listen to this! My God!
“‘A serving lady speaks: Black velvet trails its folds over the day,
White tapers, prisoned in their silver frames, Wave their thin flames
like shadows in the wind, Pia, Pompia, come—come away—’
“Now, what the devil does that mean?”
“It’s a pantry scene.”
“‘Her toes are stiffened like a stork’s in flight; She’s laid upon
her bed, on the white sheets, Her hands pressed on her smooth bust
like a saint, Bella Cunizza, come into the light!’
“My gosh, Kerry, what in hell is it all about? I swear I don’t
get him at all, and I’m a literary bird myself.”
“It’s pretty tricky,” said Kerry, “only you’ve got to think of
hearses and stale milk when you read it. That isn’t as pash as
some of them.”
Amory tossed the magazine on the table.
“Well,” he sighed, “I sure am up in the air. I know I’m not a
regular fellow, yet I loathe anybody else that isn’t. I can’t
decide whether to cultivate my mind and be a great dramatist, or
to thumb my nose at the Golden Treasury and be a Princeton
slicker.”
“Why decide?” suggested Kerry. “Better drift, like me. I’m going
to sail into prominence on Burne’s coat-tails.”
“I can’t drift—I want to be interested. I want to pull strings,
even for somebody else, or be Princetonian chairman or Triangle
president. I want to be admired, Kerry.”
“You’re thinking too much about yourself.”
Amory sat up at this.
“No. I’m thinking about you, too. We’ve got to get out and mix
around the class right now, when it’s fun to be a snob. I’d like
to bring a sardine to the prom in June, for instance, but I
wouldn’t do it unless I could be damn debonaire about
it—introduce her to all the prize parlor-snakes, and the football
captain, and all that simple stuff.”
“Amory,” said Kerry impatiently, “you’re just going around in a
circle. If you want to be prominent, get out and try for
something; if you don’t, just take it easy.” He yawned. “Come on,
let’s let the smoke drift off. We’ll go down and watch football
practice.”
Amory gradually accepted this point of view, decided that next
fall would inaugurate his career, and relinquished himself to
watching Kerry extract joy from 12 Univee.
They filled the Jewish youth’s bed with lemon pie; they put out
the gas all over the house every night by blowing into the jet in
Amory’s room, to the bewilderment of Mrs. Twelve and the local
plumber; they set up the effects of the plebeian drunks—pictures,
books, and furniture—in the bathroom, to the confusion of the
pair, who hazily discovered the transposition on their return
from a Trenton spree; they were disappointed beyond measure when
the plebeian drunks decided to take it as a joke; they played
red-dog and twenty-one and jackpot from dinner to dawn, and on
the occasion of one man’s birthday persuaded him to buy
sufficient champagne for a hilarious celebration. The donor of
the party having remained sober, Kerry and Amory accidentally
dropped him down two flights of stairs and called, shame-faced
and penitent, at the infirmary all the following week.
“Say, who are all these women?” demanded Kerry one day,
protesting at the size of Amory’s mail. “I’ve been looking at the
postmarks lately—Farmington and Dobbs and Westover and Dana
Hall—what’s the idea?”
Amory grinned.
“All from the Twin Cities.” He named them off. “There’s Marylyn
De Witt—she’s pretty, got a car of her own and that’s damn
convenient; there’s Sally Weatherby—she’s getting too fat;
there’s Myra St. Claire, she’s an old flame, easy to kiss if you
like it—”
“What line do you throw ’em?” demanded Kerry. “I’ve tried
everything, and the mad wags aren’t even afraid of me.”
“You’re the ‘nice boy’ type,” suggested Amory.
“That’s just it. Mother always feels the girl is safe if she’s
with me. Honestly, it’s annoying. If I start to hold somebody’s
hand, they laugh at me, and let me, just as if it wasn’t part of
them. As soon as I get hold of a hand they sort of disconnect it
from the rest of them.”
“Sulk,” suggested Amory. “Tell ’em you’re wild and have ’em
reform you—go home furious—come back in half an hour—startle
’em.”
Kerry shook his head.
“No chance. I wrote a St. Timothy girl a really loving letter
last year. In one place I got rattled and said: ‘My God, how I
love you!’ She took a nail scissors, clipped out the ‘My God’ and
showed the rest of the letter all over school. Doesn’t work at
all. I’m just ‘good old Kerry’ and all that rot.”
Amory smiled and tried to picture himself as “good old Amory.” He
failed completely.
February dripped snow and rain, the cyclonic freshman mid-years
passed, and life in 12 Univee continued interesting if not
purposeful. Once a day Amory indulged in a club sandwich,
cornflakes, and Julienne potatoes at “Joe’s,” accompanied usually
by Kerry or Alec Connage. The latter was a quiet, rather aloof
slicker from Hotchkiss, who lived next door and shared the same
enforced singleness as Amory, due to the fact that his entire
class had gone to Yale. “Joe’s” was unaesthetic and faintly
unsanitary, but a limitless charge account could be opened there,
a convenience that Amory appreciated. His father had been
experimenting with mining stocks and, in consequence, his
allowance, while liberal, was not at all what he had expected.
“Joe’s” had the additional advantage of seclusion from curious
upper-class eyes, so at four each afternoon Amory, accompanied by
friend or book, went up to experiment with his digestion. One day
in March, finding that all the tables were occupied, he slipped
into a chair opposite a freshman who bent intently over a book at
the last table. They nodded briefly. For twenty minutes Amory sat
consuming bacon buns and reading “Mrs. Warren’s Profession” (he
had discovered Shaw quite by accident while browsing in the
library during mid-years); the other freshman, also intent on his
volume, meanwhile did away with a trio of chocolate malted milks.
By and by Amory’s eyes wandered curiously to his fellow-luncher’s
book. He spelled out the name and title upside down—“Marpessa,”
by Stephen Phillips. This meant nothing to him, his metrical
education having been confined to such Sunday classics as “Come
into the Garden, Maude,” and what morsels of Shakespeare and
Milton had been recently forced upon him.
Moved to address his vis-a-vis, he simulated interest in his book
for a moment, and then exclaimed aloud as if involuntarily:
“Ha! Great stuff!”
The other freshman looked up and Amory registered artificial
embarrassment.
“Are you referring to your bacon buns?” His cracked, kindly voice
went well with the large spectacles and the impression of a
voluminous keenness that he gave.
“No,” Amory answered. “I was referring to Bernard Shaw.” He
turned the book around in explanation.
“I’ve never read any Shaw. I’ve always meant to.” The boy paused
and then continued: “Did you ever read Stephen Phillips, or do
you like poetry?”
“Yes, indeed,” Amory affirmed eagerly. “I’ve never read much of
Phillips, though.” (He had never heard of any Phillips except the
late David Graham.)
“It’s pretty fair, I think. Of course he’s a Victorian.” They
sallied into a discussion of poetry, in the course of which they
introduced themselves, and Amory’s companion proved to be none
other than “that awful highbrow, Thomas Parke D’Invilliers,” who
signed the passionate love-poems in the Lit. He was, perhaps,
nineteen, with stooped shoulders, pale blue eyes, and, as Amory
could tell from his general appearance, without much conception
of social competition and such phenomena of absorbing interest.
Still, he liked books, and it seemed forever since Amory had met
any one who did; if only that St. Paul’s crowd at the next table
would not mistake _him_ for a bird, too, he would enjoy the
encounter tremendously. They didn’t seem to be noticing, so he
let himself go, discussed books by the dozens—books he had read,
read about, books he had never heard of, rattling off lists of
titles with the facility of a Brentano’s clerk. D’Invilliers was
partially taken in and wholly delighted. In a good-natured way he
had almost decided that Princeton was one part deadly Philistines
and one part deadly grinds, and to find a person who could
mention Keats without stammering, yet evidently washed his hands,
was rather a treat.
“Ever read any Oscar Wilde?” he asked.
“No. Who wrote it?”
“It’s a man—don’t you know?”
“Oh, surely.” A faint chord was struck in Amory’s memory. “Wasn’t
the comic opera, ‘Patience,’ written about him?”
“Yes, that’s the fella. I’ve just finished a book of his, ‘The
Picture of Dorian Gray,’ and I certainly wish you’d read it.
You’d like it. You can borrow it if you want to.”
“Why, I’d like it a lot—thanks.”
“Don’t you want to come up to the room? I’ve got a few other
books.”
Amory hesitated, glanced at the St. Paul’s group—one of them was
the magnificent, exquisite Humbird—and he considered how
determinate the addition of this friend would be. He never got to
the stage of making them and getting rid of them—he was not hard
enough for that—so he measured Thomas Parke D’Invilliers’
undoubted attractions and value against the menace of cold eyes
behind tortoise-rimmed spectacles that he fancied glared from the
next table.
“Yes, I’ll go.”
So he found “Dorian Gray” and the “Mystic and Somber Dolores” and
the “Belle Dame sans Merci”; for a month was keen on naught else.
The world became pale and interesting, and he tried hard to look
at Princeton through the satiated eyes of Oscar Wilde and
Swinburne—or “Fingal O’Flaherty” and “Algernon Charles,” as he
called them in precieuse jest. He read enormously every
night—Shaw, Chesterton, Barrie, Pinero, Yeats, Synge, Ernest
Dowson, Arthur Symons, Keats, Sudermann, Robert Hugh Benson, the
Savoy Operas—just a heterogeneous mixture, for he suddenly
discovered that he had read nothing for years.
Tom D’Invilliers became at first an occasion rather than a
friend. Amory saw him about once a week, and together they gilded
the ceiling of Tom’s room and decorated the walls with imitation
tapestry, bought at an auction, tall candlesticks and figured
curtains. Amory liked him for being clever and literary without
effeminacy or affectation. In fact, Amory did most of the
strutting and tried painfully to make every remark an epigram,
than which, if one is content with ostensible epigrams, there are
many feats harder. 12 Univee was amused. Kerry read “Dorian Gray”
and simulated Lord Henry, following Amory about, addressing him
as “Dorian” and pretending to encourage in him wicked fancies and
attenuated tendencies to ennui. When he carried it into Commons,
to the amazement of the others at table, Amory became furiously
embarrassed, and after that made epigrams only before
D’Invilliers or a convenient mirror.
One day Tom and Amory tried reciting their own and Lord Dunsany’s
poems to the music of Kerry’s graphophone.
“Chant!” cried Tom. “Don’t recite! Chant!”
Amory, who was performing, looked annoyed, and claimed that he
needed a record with less piano in it. Kerry thereupon rolled on
the floor in stifled laughter.
“Put on ‘Hearts and Flowers’!” he howled. “Oh, my Lord, I’m going
to cast a kitten.”
“Shut off the damn graphophone,” Amory cried, rather red in the
face. “I’m not giving an exhibition.”
In the meanwhile Amory delicately kept trying to awaken a sense
of the social system in D’Invilliers, for he knew that this poet
was really more conventional than he, and needed merely watered
hair, a smaller range of conversation, and a darker brown hat to
become quite regular. But the liturgy of Livingstone collars and
dark ties fell on heedless ears; in fact D’Invilliers faintly
resented his efforts; so Amory confined himself to calls once a
week, and brought him occasionally to 12 Univee. This caused mild
titters among the other freshmen, who called them “Doctor Johnson
and Boswell.”
Alec Connage, another frequent visitor, liked him in a vague way,
but was afraid of him as a highbrow. Kerry, who saw through his
poetic patter to the solid, almost respectable depths within, was
immensely amused and would have him recite poetry by the hour,
while he lay with closed eyes on Amory’s sofa and listened:
“Asleep or waking is it? for her neck Kissed over close, wears yet a
purple speck Wherein the pained blood falters and goes out; Soft and
stung softly—fairer for a fleck...”
“That’s good,” Kerry would say softly. “It pleases the elder
Holiday. That’s a great poet, I guess.” Tom, delighted at an
audience, would ramble through the “Poems and Ballades” until
Kerry and Amory knew them almost as well as he.
Amory took to writing poetry on spring afternoons, in the gardens
of the big estates near Princeton, while swans made effective
atmosphere in the artificial pools, and slow clouds sailed
harmoniously above the willows. May came too soon, and suddenly
unable to bear walls, he wandered the campus at all hours through
starlight and rain.
A DAMP SYMBOLIC INTERLUDE
The night mist fell. From the moon it rolled, clustered about the
spires and towers, and then settled below them, so that the
dreaming peaks were still in lofty aspiration toward the sky.
Figures that dotted the day like ants now brushed along as
shadowy ghosts, in and out of the foreground. The Gothic halls
and cloisters were infinitely more mysterious as they loomed
suddenly out of the darkness, outlined each by myriad faint
squares of yellow light. Indefinitely from somewhere a bell
boomed the quarter-hour, and Amory, pausing by the sun-dial,
stretched himself out full length on the damp grass. The cool
bathed his eyes and slowed the flight of time—time that had crept
so insidiously through the lazy April afternoons, seemed so
intangible in the long spring twilights. Evening after evening
the senior singing had drifted over the campus in melancholy
beauty, and through the shell of his undergraduate consciousness
had broken a deep and reverent devotion to the gray walls and
Gothic peaks and all they symbolized as warehouses of dead ages.
The tower that in view of his window sprang upward, grew into a
spire, yearning higher until its uppermost tip was half invisible
against the morning skies, gave him the first sense of the
transiency and unimportance of the campus figures except as
holders of the apostolic succession. He liked knowing that Gothic
architecture, with its upward trend, was peculiarly appropriate
to universities, and the idea became personal to him. The silent
stretches of green, the quiet halls with an occasional
late-burning scholastic light held his imagination in a strong
grasp, and the chastity of the spire became a symbol of this
perception.
“Damn it all,” he whispered aloud, wetting his hands in the damp
and running them through his hair. “Next year I work!” Yet he
knew that where now the spirit of spires and towers made him
dreamily acquiescent, it would then overawe him. Where now he
realized only his own inconsequence, effort would make him aware
of his own impotency and insufficiency.
The college dreamed on—awake. He felt a nervous excitement that
might have been the very throb of its slow heart. It was a stream
where he was to throw a stone whose faint ripple would be
vanishing almost as it left his hand. As yet he had given
nothing, he had taken nothing.
A belated freshman, his oilskin slicker rasping loudly, slushed
along the soft path. A voice from somewhere called the inevitable
formula, “Stick out your head!” below an unseen window. A hundred
little sounds of the current drifting on under the fog pressed in
finally on his consciousness.
“Oh, God!” he cried suddenly, and started at the sound of his
voice in the stillness. The rain dripped on. A minute longer he
lay without moving, his hands clinched. Then he sprang to his
feet and gave his clothes a tentative pat.
“I’m very damn wet!” he said aloud to the sun-dial.
HISTORICAL
The war began in the summer following his freshman year. Beyond a
sporting interest in the German dash for Paris the whole affair
failed either to thrill or interest him. With the attitude he
might have held toward an amusing melodrama he hoped it would be
long and bloody. If it had not continued he would have felt like
an irate ticket-holder at a prize-fight where the principals
refused to mix it up.
That was his total reaction.
“HA-HA HORTENSE!”
“All right, ponies!”
“Shake it up!”
“Hey, ponies—how about easing up on that crap game and shaking a
mean hip?”
“Hey, _ponies!_”
The coach fumed helplessly, the Triangle Club president,
glowering with anxiety, varied between furious bursts of
authority and fits of temperamental lassitude, when he sat
spiritless and wondered how the devil the show was ever going on
tour by Christmas.
“All right. We’ll take the pirate song.”
The ponies took last drags at their cigarettes and slumped into
place; the leading lady rushed into the foreground, setting his
hands and feet in an atmospheric mince; and as the coach clapped
and stamped and tumped and da-da’d, they hashed out a dance.
A great, seething ant-hill was the Triangle Club. It gave a
musical comedy every year, travelling with cast, chorus,
orchestra, and scenery all through Christmas vacation. The play
and music were the work of undergraduates, and the club itself
was the most influential of institutions, over three hundred men
competing for it every year.
Amory, after an easy victory in the first sophomore Princetonian
competition, stepped into a vacancy of the cast as Boiling Oil, a
Pirate Lieutenant. Every night for the last week they had
rehearsed “Ha-Ha Hortense!” in the Casino, from two in the
afternoon until eight in the morning, sustained by dark and
powerful coffee, and sleeping in lectures through the interim. A
rare scene, the Casino. A big, barnlike auditorium, dotted with
boys as girls, boys as pirates, boys as babies; the scenery in
course of being violently set up; the spotlight man rehearsing by
throwing weird shafts into angry eyes; over all the constant
tuning of the orchestra or the cheerful tumpty-tump of a Triangle
tune. The boy who writes the lyrics stands in the corner, biting
a pencil, with twenty minutes to think of an encore; the business
manager argues with the secretary as to how much money can be
spent on “those damn milkmaid costumes”; the old graduate,
president in ninety-eight, perches on a box and thinks how much
simpler it was in his day.
How a Triangle show ever got off was a mystery, but it was a
riotous mystery, anyway, whether or not one did enough service to
wear a little gold Triangle on his watch-chain. “Ha-Ha Hortense!”
was written over six times and had the names of nine
collaborators on the programme. All Triangle shows started by
being “something different—not just a regular musical comedy,”
but when the several authors, the president, the coach and the
faculty committee finished with it, there remained just the old
reliable Triangle show with the old reliable jokes and the star
comedian who got expelled or sick or something just before the
trip, and the dark-whiskered man in the pony-ballet, who
“absolutely won’t shave twice a day, doggone it!”
There was one brilliant place in “Ha-Ha Hortense!” It is a
Princeton tradition that whenever a Yale man who is a member of
the widely advertised “Skull and Bones” hears the sacred name
mentioned, he must leave the room. It is also a tradition that
the members are invariably successful in later life, amassing
fortunes or votes or coupons or whatever they choose to amass.
Therefore, at each performance of “Ha-Ha Hortense!” half-a-dozen
seats were kept from sale and occupied by six of the
worst-looking vagabonds that could be hired from the streets,
further touched up by the Triangle make-up man. At the moment in
the show where Firebrand, the Pirate Chief, pointed at his black
flag and said, “I am a Yale graduate—note my Skull and Bones!”—at
this very moment the six vagabonds were instructed to rise
_conspicuously_ and leave the theatre with looks of deep
melancholy and an injured dignity. It was claimed though never
proved that on one occasion the hired Elis were swelled by one of
the real thing.
They played through vacation to the fashionable of eight cities.
Amory liked Louisville and Memphis best: these knew how to meet
strangers, furnished extraordinary punch, and flaunted an
astonishing array of feminine beauty. Chicago he approved for a
certain verve that transcended its loud accent—however, it was a
Yale town, and as the Yale Glee Club was expected in a week the
Triangle received only divided homage. In Baltimore, Princeton
was at home, and every one fell in love. There was a proper
consumption of strong waters all along the line; one man
invariably went on the stage highly stimulated, claiming that his
particular interpretation of the part required it. There were
three private cars; however, no one slept except in the third
car, which was called the “animal car,” and where were herded the
spectacled wind-jammers of the orchestra. Everything was so
hurried that there was no time to be bored, but when they arrived
in Philadelphia, with vacation nearly over, there was rest in
getting out of the heavy atmosphere of flowers and grease-paint,
and the ponies took off their corsets with abdominal pains and
sighs of relief.
When the disbanding came, Amory set out post haste for
Minneapolis, for Sally Weatherby’s cousin, Isabelle Borge, was
coming to spend the winter in Minneapolis while her parents went
abroad. He remembered Isabelle only as a little girl with whom he
had played sometimes when he first went to Minneapolis. She had
gone to Baltimore to live—but since then she had developed a
past.
Amory was in full stride, confident, nervous, and jubilant.
Scurrying back to Minneapolis to see a girl he had known as a
child seemed the interesting and romantic thing to do, so without
compunction he wired his mother not to expect him... sat in the
train, and thought about himself for thirty-six hours.
“PETTING”
On the Triangle trip Amory had come into constant contact with
that great current American phenomenon, the “petting party.”
None of the Victorian mothers—and most of the mothers were
Victorian—had any idea how casually their daughters were
accustomed to be kissed. “Servant-girls are that way,” says Mrs.
Huston-Carmelite to her popular daughter. “They are kissed first
and proposed to afterward.”
But the Popular Daughter becomes engaged every six months between
sixteen and twenty-two, when she arranges a match with young
Hambell, of Cambell & Hambell, who fatuously considers himself
her first love, and between engagements the P. D. (she is
selected by the cut-in system at dances, which favors the
survival of the fittest) has other sentimental last kisses in the
moonlight, or the firelight, or the outer darkness.
Amory saw girls doing things that even in his memory would have
been impossible: eating three-o’clock, after-dance suppers in
impossible cafes, talking of every side of life with an air half
of earnestness, half of mockery, yet with a furtive excitement
that Amory considered stood for a real moral let-down. But he
never realized how wide-spread it was until he saw the cities
between New York and Chicago as one vast juvenile intrigue.
Afternoon at the Plaza, with winter twilight hovering outside and
faint drums down-stairs... they strut and fret in the lobby,
taking another cocktail, scrupulously attired and waiting. Then
the swinging doors revolve and three bundles of fur mince in. The
theatre comes afterward; then a table at the Midnight Frolic—of
course, mother will be along there, but she will serve only to
make things more secretive and brilliant as she sits in solitary
state at the deserted table and thinks such entertainments as
this are not half so bad as they are painted, only rather
wearying. But the P. D. is in love again... it was odd, wasn’t
it?—that though there was so much room left in the taxi the P. D.
and the boy from Williams were somehow crowded out and had to go
in a separate car. Odd! Didn’t you notice how flushed the P. D.
was when she arrived just seven minutes late? But the P. D. “gets
away with it.”
The “belle” had become the “flirt,” the “flirt” had become the
“baby vamp.” The “belle” had five or six callers every afternoon.
If the P. D., by some strange accident, has two, it is made
pretty uncomfortable for the one who hasn’t a date with her. The
“belle” was surrounded by a dozen men in the intermissions
between dances. Try to find the P. D. between dances, just _try_
to find her.
The same girl... deep in an atmosphere of jungle music and the
questioning of moral codes. Amory found it rather fascinating to
feel that any popular girl he met before eight he might quite
possibly kiss before twelve.
“Why on earth are we here?” he asked the girl with the green
combs one night as they sat in some one’s limousine, outside the
Country Club in Louisville.
“I don’t know. I’m just full of the devil.”
“Let’s be frank—we’ll never see each other again. I wanted to
come out here with you because I thought you were the
best-looking girl in sight. You really don’t care whether you
ever see me again, do you?”
“No—but is this your line for every girl? What have I done to
deserve it?”
“And you didn’t feel tired dancing or want a cigarette or any of
the things you said? You just wanted to be—”
“Oh, let’s go in,” she interrupted, “if you want to _analyze_.
Let’s not _talk_ about it.”
When the hand-knit, sleeveless jerseys were stylish, Amory, in a
burst of inspiration, named them “petting shirts.” The name
travelled from coast to coast on the lips of parlor-snakes and P.
D.’s.
DESCRIPTIVE
Amory was now eighteen years old, just under six feet tall and
exceptionally, but not conventionally, handsome. He had rather a
young face, the ingenuousness of which was marred by the
penetrating green eyes, fringed with long dark eyelashes. He
lacked somehow that intense animal magnetism that so often
accompanies beauty in men or women; his personality seemed rather
a mental thing, and it was not in his power to turn it on and off
like a water-faucet. But people never forgot his face.
ISABELLE
She paused at the top of the staircase. The sensations attributed
to divers on spring-boards, leading ladies on opening nights, and
lumpy, husky young men on the day of the Big Game, crowded
through her. She should have descended to a burst of drums or a
discordant blend of themes from “Thais” and “Carmen.” She had
never been so curious about her appearance, she had never been so
satisfied with it. She had been sixteen years old for six months.
“Isabelle!” called her cousin Sally from the doorway of the
dressing-room.
“I’m ready.” She caught a slight lump of nervousness in her
throat.
“I had to send back to the house for another pair of slippers.
It’ll be just a minute.”
Isabelle started toward the dressing-room for a last peek in the
mirror, but something decided her to stand there and gaze down
the broad stairs of the Minnehaha Club. They curved
tantalizingly, and she could catch just a glimpse of two pairs of
masculine feet in the hall below. Pump-shod in uniform black,
they gave no hint of identity, but she wondered eagerly if one
pair were attached to Amory Blaine. This young man, not as yet
encountered, had nevertheless taken up a considerable part of her
day—the first day of her arrival. Coming up in the machine from
the station, Sally had volunteered, amid a rain of question,
comment, revelation, and exaggeration:
“You remember Amory Blaine, of _course_. Well, he’s simply mad to
see you again. He’s stayed over a day from college, and he’s
coming to-night. He’s heard so much about you—says he remembers
your eyes.”
This had pleased Isabelle. It put them on equal terms, although
she was quite capable of staging her own romances, with or
without advance advertising. But following her happy tremble of
anticipation, came a sinking sensation that made her ask:
“How do you mean he’s heard about me? What sort of things?”
Sally smiled. She felt rather in the capacity of a showman with
her more exotic cousin.
“He knows you’re—you’re considered beautiful and all that”—she
paused—“and I guess he knows you’ve been kissed.”
At this Isabelle’s little fist had clinched suddenly under the
fur robe. She was accustomed to be thus followed by her desperate
past, and it never failed to rouse in her the same feeling of
resentment; yet—in a strange town it was an advantageous
reputation. She was a “Speed,” was she? Well—let them find out.
Out of the window Isabelle watched the snow glide by in the
frosty morning. It was ever so much colder here than in
Baltimore; she had not remembered; the glass of the side door was
iced, the windows were shirred with snow in the corners. Her mind
played still with one subject. Did _he_ dress like that boy
there, who walked calmly down a bustling business street, in
moccasins and winter-carnival costume? How very _Western!_ Of
course he wasn’t that way: he went to Princeton, was a sophomore
or something. Really she had no distinct idea of him. An ancient
snap-shot she had preserved in an old kodak book had impressed
her by the big eyes (which he had probably grown up to by now).
However, in the last month, when her winter visit to Sally had
been decided on, he had assumed the proportions of a worthy
adversary. Children, most astute of match-makers, plot their
campaigns quickly, and Sally had played a clever correspondence
sonata to Isabelle’s excitable temperament. Isabelle had been for
some time capable of very strong, if very transient emotions....
They drew up at a spreading, white-stone building, set back from
the snowy street. Mrs. Weatherby greeted her warmly and her
various younger cousins were produced from the corners where they
skulked politely. Isabelle met them tactfully. At her best she
allied all with whom she came in contact—except older girls and
some women. All the impressions she made were conscious. The
half-dozen girls she renewed acquaintance with that morning were
all rather impressed and as much by her direct personality as by
her reputation. Amory Blaine was an open subject. Evidently a bit
light of love, neither popular nor unpopular—every girl there
seemed to have had an affair with him at some time or other, but
no one volunteered any really useful information. He was going to
fall for her.... Sally had published that information to her
young set and they were retailing it back to Sally as fast as
they set eyes on Isabelle. Isabelle resolved secretly that she
would, if necessary, _force_ herself to like him—she owed it to
Sally. Suppose she were terribly disappointed. Sally had painted
him in such glowing colors—he was good-looking, “sort of
distinguished, when he wants to be,” had a line, and was properly
inconstant. In fact, he summed up all the romance that her age
and environment led her to desire. She wondered if those were his
dancing-shoes that fox-trotted tentatively around the soft rug
below.
All impressions and, in fact, all ideas were extremely
kaleidoscopic to Isabelle. She had that curious mixture of the
social and the artistic temperaments found often in two classes,
society women and actresses. Her education or, rather, her
sophistication, had been absorbed from the boys who had dangled
on her favor; her tact was instinctive, and her capacity for
love-affairs was limited only by the number of the susceptible
within telephone distance. Flirt smiled from her large
black-brown eyes and shone through her intense physical
magnetism.
So she waited at the head of the stairs that evening while
slippers were fetched. Just as she was growing impatient, Sally
came out of the dressing-room, beaming with her accustomed good
nature and high spirits, and together they descended to the floor
below, while the shifting search-light of Isabelle’s mind flashed
on two ideas: she was glad she had high color to-night, and she
wondered if he danced well.
Down-stairs, in the club’s great room, she was surrounded for a
moment by the girls she had met in the afternoon, then she heard
Sally’s voice repeating a cycle of names, and found herself
bowing to a sextet of black and white, terribly stiff, vaguely
familiar figures. The name Blaine figured somewhere, but at first
she could not place him. A very confused, very juvenile moment of
awkward backings and bumpings followed, and every one found
himself talking to the person he least desired to. Isabelle
manoeuvred herself and Froggy Parker, freshman at Harvard, with
whom she had once played hop-scotch, to a seat on the stairs. A
humorous reference to the past was all she needed. The things
Isabelle could do socially with one idea were remarkable. First,
she repeated it rapturously in an enthusiastic contralto with a
soupcon of Southern accent; then she held it off at a distance
and smiled at it—her wonderful smile; then she delivered it in
variations and played a sort of mental catch with it, all this in
the nominal form of dialogue. Froggy was fascinated and quite
unconscious that this was being done, not for him, but for the
green eyes that glistened under the shining carefully watered
hair, a little to her left, for Isabelle had discovered Amory. As
an actress even in the fullest flush of her own conscious
magnetism gets a deep impression of most of the people in the
front row, so Isabelle sized up her antagonist. First, he had
auburn hair, and from her feeling of disappointment she knew that
she had expected him to be dark and of garter-advertisement
slenderness.... For the rest, a faint flush and a straight,
romantic profile; the effect set off by a close-fitting dress
suit and a silk ruffled shirt of the kind that women still
delight to see men wear, but men were just beginning to get tired
of.
During this inspection Amory was quietly watching.
“Don’t _you_ think so?” she said suddenly, turning to him,
innocent-eyed.
There was a stir, and Sally led the way over to their table.
Amory struggled to Isabelle’s side, and whispered:
“You’re my dinner partner, you know. We’re all coached for each
other.”
Isabelle gasped—this was rather right in line. But really she
felt as if a good speech had been taken from the star and given
to a minor character.... She mustn’t lose the leadership a bit.
The dinner-table glittered with laughter at the confusion of
getting places and then curious eyes were turned on her, sitting
near the head. She was enjoying this immensely, and Froggy Parker
was so engrossed with the added sparkle of her rising color that
he forgot to pull out Sally’s chair, and fell into a dim
confusion. Amory was on the other side, full of confidence and
vanity, gazing at her in open admiration. He began directly, and
so did Froggy:
“I’ve heard a lot about you since you wore braids—”
“Wasn’t it funny this afternoon—”
Both stopped. Isabelle turned to Amory shyly. Her face was always
enough answer for any one, but she decided to speak.
“How—from whom?”
“From everybody—for all the years since you’ve been away.” She
blushed appropriately. On her right Froggy was _hors de combat_
already, although he hadn’t quite realized it.
“I’ll tell you what I remembered about you all these years,”
Amory continued. She leaned slightly toward him and looked
modestly at the celery before her. Froggy sighed—he knew Amory,
and the situations that Amory seemed born to handle. He turned to
Sally and asked her if she was going away to school next year.
Amory opened with grape-shot.
“I’ve got an adjective that just fits you.” This was one of his
favorite starts—he seldom had a word in mind, but it was a
curiosity provoker, and he could always produce something
complimentary if he got in a tight corner.
“Oh—what?” Isabelle’s face was a study in enraptured curiosity.
Amory shook his head.
“I don’t know you very well yet.”
“Will you tell me—afterward?” she half whispered.
He nodded.
“We’ll sit out.”
Isabelle nodded.
“Did any one ever tell you, you have keen eyes?” she said.
Amory attempted to make them look even keener. He fancied, but he
was not sure, that her foot had just touched his under the table.
But it might possibly have been only the table leg. It was so
hard to tell. Still it thrilled him. He wondered quickly if there
would be any difficulty in securing the little den up-stairs.
BABES IN THE WOODS
Isabelle and Amory were distinctly not innocent, nor were they
particularly brazen. Moreover, amateur standing had very little
value in the game they were playing, a game that would presumably
be her principal study for years to come. She had begun as he
had, with good looks and an excitable temperament, and the rest
was the result of accessible popular novels and dressing-room
conversation culled from a slightly older set. Isabelle had
walked with an artificial gait at nine and a half, and when her
eyes, wide and starry, proclaimed the ingenue most. Amory was
proportionately less deceived. He waited for the mask to drop
off, but at the same time he did not question her right to wear
it. She, on her part, was not impressed by his studied air of
blasé sophistication. She had lived in a larger city and had
slightly an advantage in range. But she accepted his pose—it was
one of the dozen little conventions of this kind of affair. He
was aware that he was getting this particular favor now because
she had been coached; he knew that he stood for merely the best
game in sight, and that he would have to improve his opportunity
before he lost his advantage. So they proceeded with an infinite
guile that would have horrified her parents.
After the dinner the dance began... smoothly. Smoothly?—boys cut
in on Isabelle every few feet and then squabbled in the corners
with: “You might let me get more than an inch!” and “She didn’t
like it either—she told me so next time I cut in.” It was
true—she told every one so, and gave every hand a parting
pressure that said: “You know that your dances are _making_ my
evening.”
But time passed, two hours of it, and the less subtle beaux had
better learned to focus their pseudo-passionate glances
elsewhere, for eleven o’clock found Isabelle and Amory sitting on
the couch in the little den off the reading-room up-stairs. She
was conscious that they were a handsome pair, and seemed to
belong distinctively in this seclusion, while lesser lights
fluttered and chattered down-stairs.
Boys who passed the door looked in enviously—girls who passed
only laughed and frowned and grew wise within themselves.
They had now reached a very definite stage. They had traded
accounts of their progress since they had met last, and she had
listened to much she had heard before. He was a sophomore, was on
the Princetonian board, hoped to be chairman in senior year. He
learned that some of the boys she went with in Baltimore were
“terrible speeds” and came to dances in states of artificial
stimulation; most of them were twenty or so, and drove alluring
red Stutzes. A good half seemed to have already flunked out of
various schools and colleges, but some of them bore athletic
names that made him look at her admiringly. As a matter of fact,
Isabelle’s closer acquaintance with the universities was just
commencing. She had bowing acquaintance with a lot of young men
who thought she was a “pretty kid—worth keeping an eye on.” But
Isabelle strung the names into a fabrication of gayety that would
have dazzled a Viennese nobleman. Such is the power of young
contralto voices on sink-down sofas.
He asked her if she thought he was conceited. She said there was
a difference between conceit and self-confidence. She adored
self-confidence in men.
“Is Froggy a good friend of yours?” she asked.
“Rather—why?”
“He’s a bum dancer.”
Amory laughed.
“He dances as if the girl were on his back instead of in his
arms.”
She appreciated this.
“You’re awfully good at sizing people up.”
Amory denied this painfully. However, he sized up several people
for her. Then they talked about hands.
“You’ve got awfully nice hands,” she said. “They look as if you
played the piano. Do you?”
I have said they had reached a very definite stage—nay, more, a
very critical stage. Amory had stayed over a day to see her, and
his train left at twelve-eighteen that night. His trunk and
suitcase awaited him at the station; his watch was beginning to
hang heavy in his pocket.
“Isabelle,” he said suddenly, “I want to tell you something.”
They had been talking lightly about “that funny look in her
eyes,” and Isabelle knew from the change in his manner what was
coming—indeed, she had been wondering how soon it would come.
Amory reached above their heads and turned out the electric
light, so that they were in the dark, except for the red glow
that fell through the door from the reading-room lamps. Then he
began:
“I don’t know whether or not you know what you—what I’m going to
say. Lordy, Isabelle—this _sounds_ like a line, but it isn’t.”
“I know,” said Isabelle softly.
“Maybe we’ll never meet again like this—I have darned hard luck
sometimes.” He was leaning away from her on the other arm of the
lounge, but she could see his eyes plainly in the dark.
“You’ll meet me again—silly.” There was just the slightest
emphasis on the last word—so that it became almost a term of
endearment. He continued a bit huskily:
“I’ve fallen for a lot of people—girls—and I guess you have,
too—boys, I mean, but, honestly, you—” he broke off suddenly and
leaned forward, chin on his hands: “Oh, what’s the use—you’ll go
your way and I suppose I’ll go mine.”
Silence for a moment. Isabelle was quite stirred; she wound her
handkerchief into a tight ball, and by the faint light that
streamed over her, dropped it deliberately on the floor. Their
hands touched for an instant, but neither spoke. Silences were
becoming more frequent and more delicious. Outside another stray
couple had come up and were experimenting on the piano in the
next room. After the usual preliminary of “chopsticks,” one of
them started “Babes in the Woods” and a light tenor carried the
words into the den:
“Give me your hand I’ll understand We’re off to slumberland.”
Isabelle hummed it softly and trembled as she felt Amory’s hand
close over hers.
“Isabelle,” he whispered. “You know I’m mad about you. You _do_
give a darn about me.”
“Yes.”
“How much do you care—do you like any one better?”
“No.” He could scarcely hear her, although he bent so near that
he felt her breath against his cheek.
“Isabelle, I’m going back to college for six long months, and why
shouldn’t we—if I could only just have one thing to remember you
by—”
“Close the door....” Her voice had just stirred so that he half
wondered whether she had spoken at all. As he swung the door
softly shut, the music seemed quivering just outside.
“Moonlight is bright, Kiss me good night.”
What a wonderful song, she thought—everything was wonderful
to-night, most of all this romantic scene in the den, with their
hands clinging and the inevitable looming charmingly close. The
future vista of her life seemed an unending succession of scenes
like this: under moonlight and pale starlight, and in the backs
of warm limousines and in low, cosy roadsters stopped under
sheltering trees—only the boy might change, and this one was so
nice. He took her hand softly. With a sudden movement he turned
it and, holding it to his lips, kissed the palm.
“Isabelle!” His whisper blended in the music, and they seemed to
float nearer together. Her breath came faster. “Can’t I kiss you,
Isabelle—Isabelle?” Lips half parted, she turned her head to him
in the dark. Suddenly the ring of voices, the sound of running
footsteps surged toward them. Quick as a flash Amory reached up
and turned on the light, and when the door opened and three boys,
the wrathy and dance-craving Froggy among them, rushed in, he was
turning over the magazines on the table, while she sat without
moving, serene and unembarrassed, and even greeted them with a
welcoming smile. But her heart was beating wildly, and she felt
somehow as if she had been deprived.
It was evidently over. There was a clamor for a dance, there was
a glance that passed between them—on his side despair, on hers
regret, and then the evening went on, with the reassured beaux
and the eternal cutting in.
At quarter to twelve Amory shook hands with her gravely, in the
midst of a small crowd assembled to wish him good-speed. For an
instant he lost his poise, and she felt a bit rattled when a
satirical voice from a concealed wit cried:
“Take her outside, Amory!” As he took her hand he pressed it a
little, and she returned the pressure as she had done to twenty
hands that evening—that was all.
At two o’clock back at the Weatherbys’ Sally asked her if she and
Amory had had a “time” in the den. Isabelle turned to her
quietly. In her eyes was the light of the idealist, the inviolate
dreamer of Joan-like dreams.
“No,” she answered. “I don’t do that sort of thing any more; he
asked me to, but I said no.”
As she crept in bed she wondered what he’d say in his special
delivery to-morrow. He had such a good-looking mouth—would she
ever—?
“Fourteen angels were watching o’er them,” sang Sally sleepily
from the next room.
“Damn!” muttered Isabelle, punching the pillow into a luxurious
lump and exploring the cold sheets cautiously. “Damn!”
CARNIVAL
Amory, by way of the Princetonian, had arrived. The minor snobs,
finely balanced thermometers of success, warmed to him as the
club elections grew nigh, and he and Tom were visited by groups
of upper classmen who arrived awkwardly, balanced on the edge of
the furniture and talked of all subjects except the one of
absorbing interest. Amory was amused at the intent eyes upon him,
and, in case the visitors represented some club in which he was
not interested, took great pleasure in shocking them with
unorthodox remarks.
“Oh, let me see—” he said one night to a flabbergasted
delegation, “what club do you represent?”
With visitors from Ivy and Cottage and Tiger Inn he played the
“nice, unspoilt, ingenuous boy” very much at ease and quite
unaware of the object of the call.
When the fatal morning arrived, early in March, and the campus
became a document in hysteria, he slid smoothly into Cottage with
Alec Connage and watched his suddenly neurotic class with much
wonder.
There were fickle groups that jumped from club to club; there
were friends of two or three days who announced tearfully and
wildly that they must join the same club, nothing should separate
them; there were snarling disclosures of long-hidden grudges as
the Suddenly Prominent remembered snubs of freshman year. Unknown
men were elevated into importance when they received certain
coveted bids; others who were considered “all set” found that
they had made unexpected enemies, felt themselves stranded and
deserted, talked wildly of leaving college.
In his own crowd Amory saw men kept out for wearing green hats,
for being “a damn tailor’s dummy,” for having “too much pull in
heaven,” for getting drunk one night “not like a gentleman, by
God,” or for unfathomable secret reasons known to no one but the
wielders of the black balls.
This orgy of sociability culminated in a gigantic party at the
Nassau Inn, where punch was dispensed from immense bowls, and the
whole down-stairs became a delirious, circulating, shouting
pattern of faces and voices.
“Hi, Dibby—’gratulations!”
“Goo’ boy, Tom, you got a good bunch in Cap.”
“Say, Kerry—”
“Oh, Kerry—I hear you went Tiger with all the weight-lifters!”
“Well, I didn’t go Cottage—the parlor-snakes’ delight.”
“They say Overton fainted when he got his Ivy bid—Did he sign up
the first day?—oh, _no_. Tore over to Murray-Dodge on a
bicycle—afraid it was a mistake.”
“How’d you get into Cap—you old roue?”
“’Gratulations!”
“’Gratulations yourself. Hear you got a good crowd.”
When the bar closed, the party broke up into groups and streamed,
singing, over the snow-clad campus, in a weird delusion that
snobbishness and strain were over at last, and that they could do
what they pleased for the next two years.
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.
Alec Connage came into his room one morning and woke him up into
the sunshine and peculiar glory of Campbell Hall shining in the
window.
“Wake up, Original Sin, and scrape yourself together. Be in front
of Renwick’s in half an hour. Somebody’s got a car.” He took the
bureau cover and carefully deposited it, with its load of small
articles, upon the bed.
“Where’d you get the car?” demanded Amory cynically.
“Sacred trust, but don’t be a critical goopher or you can’t go!”
“I think I’ll sleep,” Amory said calmly, resettling himself and
reaching beside the bed for a cigarette.
“Sleep!”
“Why not? I’ve got a class at eleven-thirty.”
“You damned gloom! Of course, if you don’t want to go to the
coast—”
With a bound Amory was out of bed, scattering the bureau cover’s
burden on the floor. The coast... he hadn’t seen it for years,
since he and his mother were on their pilgrimage.
“Who’s going?” he demanded as he wriggled into his B. V. D.’s.
“Oh, Dick Humbird and Kerry Holiday and Jesse Ferrenby and—oh
about five or six. Speed it up, kid!”
In ten minutes Amory was devouring cornflakes in Renwick’s, and
at nine-thirty they bowled happily out of town, headed for the
sands of Deal Beach.
“You see,” said Kerry, “the car belongs down there. In fact, it
was stolen from Asbury Park by persons unknown, who deserted it
in Princeton and left for the West. Heartless Humbird here got
permission from the city council to deliver it.”
“Anybody got any money?” suggested Ferrenby, turning around from
the front seat.
There was an emphatic negative chorus.
“That makes it interesting.”
“Money—what’s money? We can sell the car.”
“Charge him salvage or something.”
“How’re we going to get food?” asked Amory.
“Honestly,” answered Kerry, eying him reprovingly, “do you doubt
Kerry’s ability for three short days? Some people have lived on
nothing for years at a time. Read the Boy Scout Monthly.”
“Three days,” Amory mused, “and I’ve got classes.”
“One of the days is the Sabbath.”
“Just the same, I can only cut six more classes, with over a
month and a half to go.”
“Throw him out!”
“It’s a long walk back.”
“Amory, you’re running it out, if I may coin a new phrase.”
“Hadn’t you better get some dope on yourself, Amory?”
Amory subsided resignedly and drooped into a contemplation of the
scenery. Swinburne seemed to fit in somehow.
“Oh, winter’s rains and ruins are over, And all the seasons of snows
and sins; The days dividing lover and lover, The light that loses,
the night that wins; And time remembered is grief forgotten, And
frosts are slain and flowers begotten, And in green underwood and
cover, Blossom by blossom the spring begins.
“The full streams feed on flower of—”
“What’s the matter, Amory? Amory’s thinking about poetry, about
the pretty birds and flowers. I can see it in his eye.”
“No, I’m not,” he lied. “I’m thinking about the Princetonian. I
ought to make up to-night; but I can telephone back, I suppose.”
“Oh,” said Kerry respectfully, “these important men—”
Amory flushed and it seemed to him that Ferrenby, a defeated
competitor, winced a little. Of course, Kerry was only kidding,
but he really mustn’t mention the Princetonian.
It was a halcyon day, and as they neared the shore and the salt
breezes scurried by, he began to picture the ocean and long,
level stretches of sand and red roofs over blue sea. Then they
hurried through the little town and it all flashed upon his
consciousness to a mighty paean of emotion....
“Oh, good Lord! _Look_ at it!” he cried.
“What?”
“Let me out, quick—I haven’t seen it for eight years! Oh,
gentlefolk, stop the car!”
“What an odd child!” remarked Alec.
“I do believe he’s a bit eccentric.”
The car was obligingly drawn up at a curb, and Amory ran for the
boardwalk. First, he realized that the sea was blue and that
there was an enormous quantity of it, and that it roared and
roared—really all the banalities about the ocean that one could
realize, but if any one had told him then that these things were
banalities, he would have gaped in wonder.
“Now we’ll get lunch,” ordered Kerry, wandering up with the
crowd. “Come on, Amory, tear yourself away and get practical.”
“We’ll try the best hotel first,” he went on, “and thence and so
forth.”
They strolled along the boardwalk to the most imposing hostelry
in sight, and, entering the dining-room, scattered about a table.
“Eight Bronxes,” commanded Alec, “and a club sandwich and
Juliennes. The food for one. Hand the rest around.”
Amory ate little, having seized a chair where he could watch the
sea and feel the rock of it. When luncheon was over they sat and
smoked quietly.
“What’s the bill?”
Some one scanned it.
“Eight twenty-five.”
“Rotten overcharge. We’ll give them two dollars and one for the
waiter. Kerry, collect the small change.”
The waiter approached, and Kerry gravely handed him a dollar,
tossed two dollars on the check, and turned away. They sauntered
leisurely toward the door, pursued in a moment by the suspicious
Ganymede.
“Some mistake, sir.”
Kerry took the bill and examined it critically.
“No mistake!” he said, shaking his head gravely, and, tearing it
into four pieces, he handed the scraps to the waiter, who was so
dumfounded that he stood motionless and expressionless while they
walked out.
“Won’t he send after us?”
“No,” said Kerry; “for a minute he’ll think we’re the
proprietor’s sons or something; then he’ll look at the check
again and call the manager, and in the meantime—”
They left the car at Asbury and street-car’d to Allenhurst, where
they investigated the crowded pavilions for beauty. At four there
were refreshments in a lunch-room, and this time they paid an
even smaller per cent on the total cost; something about the
appearance and savoir-faire of the crowd made the thing go, and
they were not pursued.
“You see, Amory, we’re Marxian Socialists,” explained Kerry. “We
don’t believe in property and we’re putting it to the great
test.”
“Night will descend,” Amory suggested.
“Watch, and put your trust in Holiday.”
They became jovial about five-thirty and, linking arms, strolled
up and down the boardwalk in a row, chanting a monotonous ditty
about the sad sea waves. Then Kerry saw a face in the crowd that
attracted him and, rushing off, reappeared in a moment with one
of the homeliest girls Amory had ever set eyes on. Her pale mouth
extended from ear to ear, her teeth projected in a solid wedge,
and she had little, squinty eyes that peeped ingratiatingly over
the side sweep of her nose. Kerry presented them formally.
“Name of Kaluka, Hawaiian queen! Let me present Messrs. Connage,
Sloane, Humbird, Ferrenby, and Blaine.”
The girl bobbed courtesies all around. Poor creature; Amory
supposed she had never before been noticed in her life—possibly
she was half-witted. While she accompanied them (Kerry had
invited her to supper) she said nothing which could
discountenance such a belief.
“She prefers her native dishes,” said Alec gravely to the waiter,
“but any coarse food will do.”
All through supper he addressed her in the most respectful
language, while Kerry made idiotic love to her on the other side,
and she giggled and grinned. Amory was content to sit and watch
the by-play, thinking what a light touch Kerry had, and how he
could transform the barest incident into a thing of curve and
contour. They all seemed to have the spirit of it more or less,
and it was a relaxation to be with them. Amory usually liked men
individually, yet feared them in crowds unless the crowd was
around him. He wondered how much each one contributed to the
party, for there was somewhat of a spiritual tax levied. Alec and
Kerry were the life of it, but not quite the centre. Somehow the
quiet Humbird, and Sloane, with his impatient superciliousness,
were the centre.
Dick Humbird had, ever since freshman year, seemed to Amory a
perfect type of aristocrat. He was slender but well-built—black
curly hair, straight features, and rather a dark skin. Everything
he said sounded intangibly appropriate. He possessed infinite
courage, an averagely good mind, and a sense of honor with a
clear charm and _noblesse oblige_ that varied it from
righteousness. He could dissipate without going to pieces, and
even his most bohemian adventures never seemed “running it out.”
People dressed like him, tried to talk as he did.... Amory
decided that he probably held the world back, but he wouldn’t
have changed him. ...
He differed from the healthy type that was essentially middle
class—he never seemed to perspire. Some people couldn’t be
familiar with a chauffeur without having it returned; Humbird
could have lunched at Sherry’s with a colored man, yet people
would have somehow known that it was all right. He was not a
snob, though he knew only half his class. His friends ranged from
the highest to the lowest, but it was impossible to “cultivate”
him. Servants worshipped him, and treated him like a god. He
seemed the eternal example of what the upper class tries to be.
“He’s like those pictures in the Illustrated London News of the
English officers who have been killed,” Amory had said to Alec.
“Well,” Alec had answered, “if you want to know the shocking
truth, his father was a grocery clerk who made a fortune in
Tacoma real estate and came to New York ten years ago.”
Amory had felt a curious sinking sensation.
This present type of party was made possible by the surging
together of the class after club elections—as if to make a last
desperate attempt to know itself, to keep together, to fight off
the tightening spirit of the clubs. It was a let-down from the
conventional heights they had all walked so rigidly.
After supper they saw Kaluka to the boardwalk, and then strolled
back along the beach to Asbury. The evening sea was a new
sensation, for all its color and mellow age was gone, and it
seemed the bleak waste that made the Norse sagas sad; Amory
thought of Kipling’s
“Beaches of Lukanon before the sealers came.”
It was still a music, though, infinitely sorrowful.
Ten o’clock found them penniless. They had suppered greatly on
their last eleven cents and, singing, strolled up through the
casinos and lighted arches on the boardwalk, stopping to listen
approvingly to all band concerts. In one place Kerry took up a
collection for the French War Orphans which netted a dollar and
twenty cents, and with this they bought some brandy in case they
caught cold in the night. They finished the day in a
moving-picture show and went into solemn systematic roars of
laughter at an ancient comedy, to the startled annoyance of the
rest of the audience. Their entrance was distinctly strategic,
for each man as he entered pointed reproachfully at the one just
behind him. Sloane, bringing up the rear, disclaimed all
knowledge and responsibility as soon as the others were scattered
inside; then as the irate ticket-taker rushed in he followed
nonchalantly.
They reassembled later by the Casino and made arrangements for
the night. Kerry wormed permission from the watchman to sleep on
the platform and, having collected a huge pile of rugs from the
booths to serve as mattresses and blankets, they talked until
midnight, and then fell into a dreamless sleep, though Amory
tried hard to stay awake and watch that marvellous moon settle on
the sea.
So they progressed for two happy days, up and down the shore by
street-car or machine, or by shoe-leather on the crowded
boardwalk; sometimes eating with the wealthy, more frequently
dining frugally at the expense of an unsuspecting restaurateur.
They had their photos taken, eight poses, in a quick-development
store. Kerry insisted on grouping them as a “varsity” football
team, and then as a tough gang from the East Side, with their
coats inside out, and himself sitting in the middle on a
cardboard moon. The photographer probably has them yet—at least,
they never called for them. The weather was perfect, and again
they slept outside, and again Amory fell unwillingly asleep.
Sunday broke stolid and respectable, and even the sea seemed to
mumble and complain, so they returned to Princeton via the Fords
of transient farmers, and broke up with colds in their heads, but
otherwise none the worse for wandering.
Even more than in the year before, Amory neglected his work, not
deliberately but lazily and through a multitude of other
interests. Co-ordinate geometry and the melancholy hexameters of
Corneille and Racine held forth small allurements, and even
psychology, which he had eagerly awaited, proved to be a dull
subject full of muscular reactions and biological phrases rather
than the study of personality and influence. That was a noon
class, and it always sent him dozing. Having found that
“subjective and objective, sir,” answered most of the questions,
he used the phrase on all occasions, and it became the class joke
when, on a query being levelled at him, he was nudged awake by
Ferrenby or Sloane to gasp it out.
Mostly there were parties—to Orange or the Shore, more rarely to
New York and Philadelphia, though one night they marshalled
fourteen waitresses out of Childs’ and took them to ride down
Fifth Avenue on top of an auto bus. They all cut more classes
than were allowed, which meant an additional course the following
year, but spring was too rare to let anything interfere with
their colorful ramblings. In May Amory was elected to the
Sophomore Prom Committee, and when after a long evening’s
discussion with Alec they made out a tentative list of class
probabilities for the senior council, they placed themselves
among the surest. The senior council was composed presumably of
the eighteen most representative seniors, and in view of Alec’s
football managership and Amory’s chance of nosing out Burne
Holiday as Princetonian chairman, they seemed fairly justified in
this presumption. Oddly enough, they both placed D’Invilliers as
among the possibilities, a guess that a year before the class
would have gaped at.
All through the spring Amory had kept up an intermittent
correspondence with Isabelle Borge, punctuated by violent
squabbles and chiefly enlivened by his attempts to find new words
for love. He discovered Isabelle to be discreetly and
aggravatingly unsentimental in letters, but he hoped against hope
that she would prove not too exotic a bloom to fit the large
spaces of spring as she had fitted the den in the Minnehaha Club.
During May he wrote thirty-page documents almost nightly, and
sent them to her in bulky envelopes exteriorly labelled “Part I”
and “Part II.”
“Oh, Alec, I believe I’m tired of college,” he said sadly, as
they walked the dusk together.
“I think I am, too, in a way.”
“All I’d like would be a little home in the country, some warm
country, and a wife, and just enough to do to keep from rotting.”
“Me, too.”
“I’d like to quit.”
“What does your girl say?”
“Oh!” Amory gasped in horror. “She wouldn’t _think_ of
marrying... that is, not now. I mean the future, you know.”
“My girl would. I’m engaged.”
“Are you really?”
“Yes. Don’t say a word to anybody, please, but I am. I may not
come back next year.”
“But you’re only twenty! Give up college?”
“Why, Amory, you were saying a minute ago—”
“Yes,” Amory interrupted, “but I was just wishing. I wouldn’t
think of leaving college. It’s just that I feel so sad these
wonderful nights. I sort of feel they’re never coming again, and
I’m not really getting all I could out of them. I wish my girl
lived here. But marry—not a chance. Especially as father says the
money isn’t forthcoming as it used to be.”
“What a waste these nights are!” agreed Alec.
But Amory sighed and made use of the nights. He had a snap-shot
of Isabelle, enshrined in an old watch, and at eight almost every
night he would turn off all the lights except the desk lamp and,
sitting by the open windows with the picture before him, write
her rapturous letters.
... Oh it’s so hard to write you what I really _feel_ when I think
about you so much; you’ve gotten to mean to me a _dream_ that I can’t
put on paper any more. Your last letter came and it was wonderful! I
read it over about six times, especially the last part, but I do wish,
sometimes, you’d be more _frank_ and tell me what you really do think
of me, yet your last letter was too good to be true, and I can hardly
wait until June! Be sure and be able to come to the prom. It’ll be
fine, I think, and I want to bring _you_ just at the end of a
wonderful year. I often think over what you said on that night and
wonder how much you meant. If it were anyone but you—but you see I
_thought_ you were fickle the first time I saw you and you are so
popular and everthing that I can’t imagine you really liking me
_best_.
Oh, Isabelle, dear—it’s a wonderful night. Somebody is playing “Love
Moon” on a mandolin far across the campus, and the music seems to
bring you into the window. Now he’s playing “Good-by, Boys, I’m
Through,” and how well it suits me. For I am through with
everything. I have decided never to take a cocktail again, and I
know I’ll never again fall in love—I couldn’t—you’ve been too much a
part of my days and nights to ever let me think of another girl. I
meet them all the time and they don’t interest me. I’m not pretending
to be blasé, because it’s not that. It’s just that I’m in love. Oh,
_dearest_ Isabelle (somehow I can’t call you just Isabelle, and I’m
afraid I’ll come out with the “dearest” before your family this
June), you’ve got to come to the prom, and then I’ll come up to your
house for a day and everything’ll be perfect....
And so on in an eternal monotone that seemed to both of them
infinitely charming, infinitely new.
June came and the days grew so hot and lazy that they could not
worry even about exams, but spent dreamy evenings on the court of
Cottage, talking of long subjects until the sweep of country
toward Stony Brook became a blue haze and the lilacs were white
around tennis-courts, and words gave way to silent cigarettes....
Then down deserted Prospect and along McCosh with song everywhere
around them, up to the hot joviality of Nassau Street.
Tom D’Invilliers and Amory walked late in those days. A gambling
fever swept through the sophomore class and they bent over the
bones till three o’clock many a sultry night. After one session
they came out of Sloane’s room to find the dew fallen and the
stars old in the sky.
“Let’s borrow bicycles and take a ride,” Amory suggested.
“All right. I’m not a bit tired and this is almost the last night
of the year, really, because the prom stuff starts Monday.”
They found two unlocked bicycles in Holder Court and rode out
about half-past three along the Lawrenceville Road.
“What are you going to do this summer, Amory?”
“Don’t ask me—same old things, I suppose. A month or two in Lake
Geneva—I’m counting on you to be there in July, you know—then
there’ll be Minneapolis, and that means hundreds of summer hops,
parlor-snaking, getting bored—But oh, Tom,” he added suddenly,
“hasn’t this year been slick!”
“No,” declared Tom emphatically, a new Tom, clothed by Brooks,
shod by Franks, “I’ve won this game, but I feel as if I never
want to play another. You’re all right—you’re a rubber ball, and
somehow it suits you, but I’m sick of adapting myself to the
local snobbishness of this corner of the world. I want to go
where people aren’t barred because of the color of their neckties
and the roll of their coats.”
“You can’t, Tom,” argued Amory, as they rolled along through the
scattering night; “wherever you go now you’ll always
unconsciously apply these standards of ‘having it’ or ‘lacking
it.’ For better or worse we’ve stamped you; you’re a Princeton
type!”
“Well, then,” complained Tom, his cracked voice rising
plaintively, “why do I have to come back at all? I’ve learned all
that Princeton has to offer. Two years more of mere pedantry and
lying around a club aren’t going to help. They’re just going to
disorganize me, conventionalize me completely. Even now I’m so
spineless that I wonder how I get away with it.”
“Oh, but you’re missing the real point, Tom,” Amory interrupted.
“You’ve just had your eyes opened to the snobbishness of the
world in a rather abrupt manner. Princeton invariably gives the
thoughtful man a social sense.”
“You consider you taught me that, don’t you?” he asked
quizzically, eying Amory in the half dark.
Amory laughed quietly.
“Didn’t I?”
“Sometimes,” he said slowly, “I think you’re my bad angel. I
might have been a pretty fair poet.”
“Come on, that’s rather hard. You chose to come to an Eastern
college. Either your eyes were opened to the mean scrambling
quality of people, or you’d have gone through blind, and you’d
hate to have done that—been like Marty Kaye.”
“Yes,” he agreed, “you’re right. I wouldn’t have liked it. Still,
it’s hard to be made a cynic at twenty.”
“I was born one,” Amory murmured. “I’m a cynical idealist.” He
paused and wondered if that meant anything.
They reached the sleeping school of Lawrenceville, and turned to
ride back.
“It’s good, this ride, isn’t it?” Tom said presently.
“Yes; it’s a good finish, it’s knock-out; everything’s good
to-night. Oh, for a hot, languorous summer and Isabelle!”
“Oh, you and your Isabelle! I’ll bet she’s a simple one... let’s
say some poetry.”
So Amory declaimed “The Ode to a Nightingale” to the bushes they
passed.
“I’ll never be a poet,” said Amory as he finished. “I’m not
enough of a sensualist really; there are only a few obvious
things that I notice as primarily beautiful: women, spring
evenings, music at night, the sea; I don’t catch the subtle
things like ‘silver-snarling trumpets.’ I may turn out an
intellectual, but I’ll never write anything but mediocre poetry.”
They rode into Princeton as the sun was making colored maps of
the sky behind the graduate school, and hurried to the
refreshment of a shower that would have to serve in place of
sleep. By noon the bright-costumed alumni crowded the streets
with their bands and choruses, and in the tents there was great
reunion under the orange-and-black banners that curled and
strained in the wind. Amory looked long at one house which bore
the legend “Sixty-nine.” There a few gray-haired men sat and
talked quietly while the classes swept by in panorama of life.
UNDER THE ARC-LIGHT
Then tragedy’s emerald eyes glared suddenly at Amory over the
edge of June. On the night after his ride to Lawrenceville a
crowd sallied to New York in quest of adventure, and started back
to Princeton about twelve o’clock in two machines. It had been a
gay party and different stages of sobriety were represented.
Amory was in the car behind; they had taken the wrong road and
lost the way, and so were hurrying to catch up.
It was a clear night and the exhilaration of the road went to
Amory’s head. He had the ghost of two stanzas of a poem forming
in his mind. ...
So the gray car crept nightward in the dark and there was no life
stirred as it went by.... As the still ocean paths before the shark
in starred and glittering waterways, beauty-high, the moon-swathed
trees divided, pair on pair, while flapping nightbirds cried across
the air....
A moment by an inn of lamps and shades, a yellow inn under a yellow
moon—then silence, where crescendo laughter fades... the car swung
out again to the winds of June, mellowed the shadows where the
distance grew, then crushed the yellow shadows into blue....
They jolted to a stop, and Amory peered up, startled. A woman was
standing beside the road, talking to Alec at the wheel. Afterward
he remembered the harpy effect that her old kimono gave her, and
the cracked hollowness of her voice as she spoke:
“You Princeton boys?”
“Yes.”
“Well, there’s one of you killed here, and two others about
dead.”
“_My God!_”
“Look!” She pointed and they gazed in horror. Under the full
light of a roadside arc-light lay a form, face downward in a
widening circle of blood.
They sprang from the car. Amory thought of the back of that
head—that hair—that hair... and then they turned the form over.
“It’s Dick—Dick Humbird!”
“Oh, Christ!”
“Feel his heart!”
Then the insistent voice of the old crone in a sort of croaking
triumph:
“He’s quite dead, all right. The car turned over. Two of the men
that weren’t hurt just carried the others in, but this one’s no
use.”
Amory rushed into the house and the rest followed with a limp
mass that they laid on the sofa in the shoddy little front
parlor. Sloane, with his shoulder punctured, was on another
lounge. He was half delirious, and kept calling something about a
chemistry lecture at 8:10.
“I don’t know what happened,” said Ferrenby in a strained voice.
“Dick was driving and he wouldn’t give up the wheel; we told him
he’d been drinking too much—then there was this damn curve—oh, my
_God!_...” He threw himself face downward on the floor and broke
into dry sobs.
The doctor had arrived, and Amory went over to the couch, where
some one handed him a sheet to put over the body. With a sudden
hardness, he raised one of the hands and let it fall back
inertly. The brow was cold but the face not expressionless. He
looked at the shoe-laces—Dick had tied them that morning. _He_
had tied them—and now he was this heavy white mass. All that
remained of the charm and personality of the Dick Humbird he had
known—oh, it was all so horrible and unaristocratic and close to
the earth. All tragedy has that strain of the grotesque and
squalid—so useless, futile... the way animals die.... Amory was
reminded of a cat that had lain horribly mangled in some alley of
his childhood.
“Some one go to Princeton with Ferrenby.”
Amory stepped outside the door and shivered slightly at the late
night wind—a wind that stirred a broken fender on the mass of
bent metal to a plaintive, tinny sound.
CRESCENDO!
Next day, by a merciful chance, passed in a whirl. When Amory was
by himself his thoughts zigzagged inevitably to the picture of
that red mouth yawning incongruously in the white face, but with
a determined effort he piled present excitement upon the memory
of it and shut it coldly away from his mind.
Isabelle and her mother drove into town at four, and they rode up
smiling Prospect Avenue, through the gay crowd, to have tea at
Cottage. The clubs had their annual dinners that night, so at
seven he loaned her to a freshman and arranged to meet her in the
gymnasium at eleven, when the upper classmen were admitted to the
freshman dance. She was all he had expected, and he was happy and
eager to make that night the centre of every dream. At nine the
upper classes stood in front of the clubs as the freshman
torchlight parade rioted past, and Amory wondered if the
dress-suited groups against the dark, stately backgrounds and
under the flare of the torches made the night as brilliant to the
staring, cheering freshmen as it had been to him the year before.
The next day was another whirl. They lunched in a gay party of
six in a private dining-room at the club, while Isabelle and
Amory looked at each other tenderly over the fried chicken and
knew that their love was to be eternal. They danced away the prom
until five, and the stags cut in on Isabelle with joyous abandon,
which grew more and more enthusiastic as the hour grew late, and
their wines, stored in overcoat pockets in the coat room, made
old weariness wait until another day. The stag line is a most
homogeneous mass of men. It fairly sways with a single soul. A
dark-haired beauty dances by and there is a half-gasping sound as
the ripple surges forward and some one sleeker than the rest
darts out and cuts in. Then when the six-foot girl (brought by
Kaye in your class, and to whom he has been trying to introduce
you all evening) gallops by, the line surges back and the groups
face about and become intent on far corners of the hall, for
Kaye, anxious and perspiring, appears elbowing through the crowd
in search of familiar faces.
“I say, old man, I’ve got an awfully nice—”
“Sorry, Kaye, but I’m set for this one. I’ve got to cut in on a
fella.”
“Well, the next one?”
“What—ah—er—I swear I’ve got to go cut in—look me up when she’s
got a dance free.”
It delighted Amory when Isabelle suggested that they leave for a
while and drive around in her car. For a delicious hour that
passed too soon they glided the silent roads about Princeton and
talked from the surface of their hearts in shy excitement. Amory
felt strangely ingenuous and made no attempt to kiss her.
Next day they rode up through the Jersey country, had luncheon in
New York, and in the afternoon went to see a problem play at
which Isabelle wept all through the second act, rather to Amory’s
embarrassment—though it filled him with tenderness to watch her.
He was tempted to lean over and kiss away her tears, and she
slipped her hand into his under cover of darkness to be pressed
softly.
Then at six they arrived at the Borges’ summer place on Long
Island, and Amory rushed up-stairs to change into a dinner coat.
As he put in his studs he realized that he was enjoying life as
he would probably never enjoy it again. Everything was hallowed
by the haze of his own youth. He had arrived, abreast of the best
in his generation at Princeton. He was in love and his love was
returned. Turning on all the lights, he looked at himself in the
mirror, trying to find in his own face the qualities that made
him see clearer than the great crowd of people, that made him
decide firmly, and able to influence and follow his own will.
There was little in his life now that he would have changed. ...
Oxford might have been a bigger field.
Silently he admired himself. How conveniently well he looked, and
how well a dinner coat became him. He stepped into the hall and
then waited at the top of the stairs, for he heard footsteps
coming. It was Isabelle, and from the top of her shining hair to
her little golden slippers she had never seemed so beautiful.
“Isabelle!” he cried, half involuntarily, and held out his arms.
As in the story-books, she ran into them, and on that
half-minute, as their lips first touched, rested the high point
of vanity, the crest of his young egotism.
CHAPTER 3. The Egotist Considers
“Ouch! Let me go!”
He dropped his arms to his sides.
“What’s the matter?”
“Your shirt stud—it hurt me—look!” She was looking down at her
neck, where a little blue spot about the size of a pea marred its
pallor.
“Oh, Isabelle,” he reproached himself, “I’m a goopher. Really,
I’m sorry—I shouldn’t have held you so close.”
She looked up impatiently.
“Oh, Amory, of course you couldn’t help it, and it didn’t hurt
much; but what _are_ we going to do about it?”
“_Do_ about it?” he asked. “Oh—that spot; it’ll disappear in a
second.”
“It isn’t,” she said, after a moment of concentrated gazing,
“it’s still there—and it looks like Old Nick—oh, Amory, what’ll
we do! It’s _just_ the height of your shoulder.”
“Massage it,” he suggested, repressing the faintest inclination
to laugh.
She rubbed it delicately with the tips of her fingers, and then a
tear gathered in the corner of her eye, and slid down her cheek.
“Oh, Amory,” she said despairingly, lifting up a most pathetic
face, “I’ll just make my whole neck _flame_ if I rub it. What’ll
I do?”
A quotation sailed into his head and he couldn’t resist repeating
it aloud.
“All the perfumes of Arabia will not whiten this little hand.”
She looked up and the sparkle of the tear in her eye was like
ice.
“You’re not very sympathetic.”
Amory mistook her meaning.
“Isabelle, darling, I think it’ll—”
“Don’t touch me!” she cried. “Haven’t I enough on my mind and you
stand there and _laugh!_”
Then he slipped again.
“Well, it _is_ funny, Isabelle, and we were talking the other day
about a sense of humor being—”
She was looking at him with something that was not a smile,
rather the faint, mirthless echo of a smile, in the corners of
her mouth.
“Oh, shut up!” she cried suddenly, and fled down the hallway
toward her room. Amory stood there, covered with remorseful
confusion.
“Damn!”
When Isabelle reappeared she had thrown a light wrap about her
shoulders, and they descended the stairs in a silence that
endured through dinner.
“Isabelle,” he began rather testily, as they arranged themselves
in the car, bound for a dance at the Greenwich Country Club,
“you’re angry, and I’ll be, too, in a minute. Let’s kiss and make
up.”
Isabelle considered glumly.
“I hate to be laughed at,” she said finally.
“I won’t laugh any more. I’m not laughing now, am I?”
“You did.”
“Oh, don’t be so darned feminine.”
Her lips curled slightly.
“I’ll be anything I want.”
Amory kept his temper with difficulty. He became aware that he
had not an ounce of real affection for Isabelle, but her coldness
piqued him. He wanted to kiss her, kiss her a lot, because then
he knew he could leave in the morning and not care. On the
contrary, if he didn’t kiss her, it would worry him.... It would
interfere vaguely with his idea of himself as a conqueror. It
wasn’t dignified to come off second best, _pleading_, with a
doughty warrior like Isabelle.
Perhaps she suspected this. At any rate, Amory watched the night
that should have been the consummation of romance glide by with
great moths overhead and the heavy fragrance of roadside gardens,
but without those broken words, those little sighs....
Afterward they suppered on ginger ale and devil’s food in the
pantry, and Amory announced a decision.
“I’m leaving early in the morning.”
“Why?”
“Why not?” he countered.
“There’s no need.”
“However, I’m going.”
“Well, if you insist on being ridiculous—”
“Oh, don’t put it that way,” he objected.
“—just because I won’t let you kiss me. Do you think—”
“Now, Isabelle,” he interrupted, “you know it’s not that—even
suppose it is. We’ve reached the stage where we either ought to
kiss—or—or—nothing. It isn’t as if you were refusing on moral
grounds.”
She hesitated.
“I really don’t know what to think about you,” she began, in a
feeble, perverse attempt at conciliation. “You’re so funny.”
“How?”
“Well, I thought you had a lot of self-confidence and all that;
remember you told me the other day that you could do anything you
wanted, or get anything you wanted?”
Amory flushed. He _had_ told her a lot of things.
“Yes.”
“Well, you didn’t seem to feel so self-confident to-night. Maybe
you’re just plain conceited.”
“No, I’m not,” he hesitated. “At Princeton—”
“Oh, you and Princeton! You’d think that was the world, the way
you talk! Perhaps you _can_ write better than anybody else on
your old Princetonian; maybe the freshmen _do_ think you’re
important—”
“You don’t understand—”
“Yes, I do,” she interrupted. “I _do_, because you’re always
talking about yourself and I used to like it; now I don’t.”
“Have I to-night?”
“That’s just the point,” insisted Isabelle. “You got all upset
to-night. You just sat and watched my eyes. Besides, I have to
think all the time I’m talking to you—you’re so critical.”
“I make you think, do I?” Amory repeated with a touch of vanity.
“You’re a nervous strain”—this emphatically—“and when you analyze
every little emotion and instinct I just don’t have ’em.”
“I know.” Amory admitted her point and shook his head helplessly.
“Let’s go.” She stood up.
He rose abstractedly and they walked to the foot of the stairs.
“What train can I get?”
“There’s one about 9:11 if you really must go.”
“Yes, I’ve got to go, really. Good night.”
“Good night.”
They were at the head of the stairs, and as Amory turned into his
room he thought he caught just the faintest cloud of discontent
in her face. He lay awake in the darkness and wondered how much
he cared—how much of his sudden unhappiness was hurt
vanity—whether he was, after all, temperamentally unfitted for
romance.
When he awoke, it was with a glad flood of consciousness. The
early wind stirred the chintz curtains at the windows and he was
idly puzzled not to be in his room at Princeton with his school
football picture over the bureau and the Triangle Club on the
wall opposite. Then the grandfather’s clock in the hall outside
struck eight, and the memory of the night before came to him. He
was out of bed, dressing, like the wind; he must get out of the
house before he saw Isabelle. What had seemed a melancholy
happening, now seemed a tiresome anticlimax. He was dressed at
half past, so he sat down by the window; felt that the sinews of
his heart were twisted somewhat more than he had thought. What an
ironic mockery the morning seemed!—bright and sunny, and full of
the smell of the garden; hearing Mrs. Borge’s voice in the
sun-parlor below, he wondered where was Isabelle.
There was a knock at the door.
“The car will be around at ten minutes of nine, sir.”
He returned to his contemplation of the outdoors, and began
repeating over and over, mechanically, a verse from Browning,
which he had once quoted to Isabelle in a letter:
“Each life unfulfilled, you see, It hangs still, patchy and scrappy;
We have not sighed deep, laughed free, Starved, feasted,
despaired—been happy.”
But his life would not be unfulfilled. He took a sombre
satisfaction in thinking that perhaps all along she had been
nothing except what he had read into her; that this was her high
point, that no one else would ever make her think. Yet that was
what she had objected to in him; and Amory was suddenly tired of
thinking, thinking!
“Damn her!” he said bitterly, “she’s spoiled my year!”
THE SUPERMAN GROWS CARELESS
On a dusty day in September Amory arrived in Princeton and joined
the sweltering crowd of conditioned men who thronged the streets.
It seemed a stupid way to commence his upper-class years, to
spend four hours a morning in the stuffy room of a tutoring
school, imbibing the infinite boredom of conic sections. Mr.
Rooney, pander to the dull, conducted the class and smoked
innumerable Pall Malls as he drew diagrams and worked equations
from six in the morning until midnight.
“Now, Langueduc, if I used that formula, where would my A point
be?”
Langueduc lazily shifts his six-foot-three of football material
and tries to concentrate.
“Oh—ah—I’m damned if I know, Mr. Rooney.”
“Oh, why of course, of course you can’t _use_ that formula.
_That’s_ what I wanted you to say.”
“Why, sure, of course.”
“Do you see why?”
“You bet—I suppose so.”
“If you don’t see, tell me. I’m here to show you.”
“Well, Mr. Rooney, if you don’t mind, I wish you’d go over that
again.”
“Gladly. Now here’s ‘A’...”
The room was a study in stupidity—two huge stands for paper, Mr.
Rooney in his shirt-sleeves in front of them, and slouched around
on chairs, a dozen men: Fred Sloane, the pitcher, who absolutely
_had_ to get eligible; “Slim” Langueduc, who would beat Yale this
fall, if only he could master a poor fifty per cent; McDowell,
gay young sophomore, who thought it was quite a sporting thing to
be tutoring here with all these prominent athletes.
“Those poor birds who haven’t a cent to tutor, and have to study
during the term are the ones I pity,” he announced to Amory one
day, with a flaccid camaraderie in the droop of the cigarette
from his pale lips. “I should think it would be such a bore,
there’s so much else to do in New York during the term. I suppose
they don’t know what they miss, anyhow.” There was such an air of
“you and I” about Mr. McDowell that Amory very nearly pushed him
out of the open window when he said this. ... Next February his
mother would wonder why he didn’t make a club and increase his
allowance... simple little nut....
Through the smoke and the air of solemn, dense earnestness that
filled the room would come the inevitable helpless cry:
“I don’t get it! Repeat that, Mr. Rooney!” Most of them were so
stupid or careless that they wouldn’t admit when they didn’t
understand, and Amory was of the latter. He found it impossible
to study conic sections; something in their calm and tantalizing
respectability breathing defiantly through Mr. Rooney’s fetid
parlors distorted their equations into insoluble anagrams. He
made a last night’s effort with the proverbial wet towel, and
then blissfully took the exam, wondering unhappily why all the
color and ambition of the spring before had faded out. Somehow,
with the defection of Isabelle the idea of undergraduate success
had loosed its grasp on his imagination, and he contemplated a
possible failure to pass off his condition with equanimity, even
though it would arbitrarily mean his removal from the
Princetonian board and the slaughter of his chances for the
Senior Council.
There was always his luck.
He yawned, scribbled his honor pledge on the cover, and sauntered
from the room.
“If you don’t pass it,” said the newly arrived Alec as they sat
on the window-seat of Amory’s room and mused upon a scheme of
wall decoration, “you’re the world’s worst goopher. Your stock
will go down like an elevator at the club and on the campus.”
“Oh, hell, I know it. Why rub it in?”
“’Cause you deserve it. Anybody that’d risk what you were in line
for _ought_ to be ineligible for Princetonian chairman.”
“Oh, drop the subject,” Amory protested. “Watch and wait and shut
up. I don’t want every one at the club asking me about it, as if
I were a prize potato being fattened for a vegetable show.” One
evening a week later Amory stopped below his own window on the
way to Renwick’s, and, seeing a light, called up:
“Oh, Tom, any mail?”
Alec’s head appeared against the yellow square of light.
“Yes, your result’s here.”
His heart clamored violently.
“What is it, blue or pink?”
“Don’t know. Better come up.”
He walked into the room and straight over to the table, and then
suddenly noticed that there were other people in the room.
“’Lo, Kerry.” He was most polite. “Ah, men of Princeton.” They
seemed to be mostly friends, so he picked up the envelope marked
“Registrar’s Office,” and weighed it nervously.
“We have here quite a slip of paper.”
“Open it, Amory.”
“Just to be dramatic, I’ll let you know that if it’s blue, my
name is withdrawn from the editorial board of the Prince, and my
short career is over.”
He paused, and then saw for the first time Ferrenby’s eyes,
wearing a hungry look and watching him eagerly. Amory returned
the gaze pointedly.
“Watch my face, gentlemen, for the primitive emotions.”
He tore it open and held the slip up to the light.
“Well?”
“Pink or blue?”
“Say what it is.”
“We’re all ears, Amory.”
“Smile or swear—or something.”
There was a pause... a small crowd of seconds swept by... then he
looked again and another crowd went on into time.
“Blue as the sky, gentlemen....”
AFTERMATH
What Amory did that year from early September to late in the
spring was so purposeless and inconsecutive that it seems
scarcely worth recording. He was, of course, immediately sorry
for what he had lost. His philosophy of success had tumbled down
upon him, and he looked for the reasons.
“Your own laziness,” said Alec later.
“No—something deeper than that. I’ve begun to feel that I was
meant to lose this chance.”
“They’re rather off you at the club, you know; every man that
doesn’t come through makes our crowd just so much weaker.”
“I hate that point of view.”
“Of course, with a little effort you could still stage a
comeback.”
“No—I’m through—as far as ever being a power in college is
concerned.”
“But, Amory, honestly, what makes me the angriest isn’t the fact
that you won’t be chairman of the Prince and on the Senior
Council, but just that you didn’t get down and pass that exam.”
“Not me,” said Amory slowly; “I’m mad at the concrete thing. My
own idleness was quite in accord with my system, but the luck
broke.”
“Your system broke, you mean.”
“Maybe.”
“Well, what are you going to do? Get a better one quick, or just
bum around for two more years as a has-been?”
“I don’t know yet...”
“Oh, Amory, buck up!”
“Maybe.”
Amory’s point of view, though dangerous, was not far from the
true one. If his reactions to his environment could be tabulated,
the chart would have appeared like this, beginning with his
earliest years:
1. The fundamental Amory.
2. Amory plus Beatrice.
3. Amory plus Beatrice plus Minneapolis.
Then St. Regis’ had pulled him to pieces and started him over
again:
4. Amory plus St. Regis’.
5. Amory plus St. Regis’ plus Princeton.
That had been his nearest approach to success through conformity.
The fundamental Amory, idle, imaginative, rebellious, had been
nearly snowed under. He had conformed, he had succeeded, but as
his imagination was neither satisfied nor grasped by his own
success, he had listlessly, half-accidentally chucked the whole
thing and become again:
6. The fundamental Amory.
FINANCIAL
His father died quietly and inconspicuously at Thanksgiving. The
incongruity of death with either the beauties of Lake Geneva or
with his mother’s dignified, reticent attitude diverted him, and
he looked at the funeral with an amused tolerance. He decided
that burial was after all preferable to cremation, and he smiled
at his old boyhood choice, slow oxidation in the top of a tree.
The day after the ceremony he was amusing himself in the great
library by sinking back on a couch in graceful mortuary
attitudes, trying to determine whether he would, when his day
came, be found with his arms crossed piously over his chest
(Monsignor Darcy had once advocated this posture as being the
most distinguished), or with his hands clasped behind his head, a
more pagan and Byronic attitude.
What interested him much more than the final departure of his
father from things mundane was a tri-cornered conversation
between Beatrice, Mr. Barton, of Barton and Krogman, their
lawyers, and himself, that took place several days after the
funeral. For the first time he came into actual cognizance of the
family finances, and realized what a tidy fortune had once been
under his father’s management. He took a ledger labelled “1906”
and ran through it rather carefully. The total expenditure that
year had come to something over one hundred and ten thousand
dollars. Forty thousand of this had been Beatrice’s own income,
and there had been no attempt to account for it: it was all under
the heading, “Drafts, checks, and letters of credit forwarded to
Beatrice Blaine.” The dispersal of the rest was rather minutely
itemized: the taxes and improvements on the Lake Geneva estate
had come to almost nine thousand dollars; the general up-keep,
including Beatrice’s electric and a French car, bought that year,
was over thirty-five thousand dollars. The rest was fully taken
care of, and there were invariably items which failed to balance
on the right side of the ledger.
In the volume for 1912 Amory was shocked to discover the decrease
in the number of bond holdings and the great drop in the income.
In the case of Beatrice’s money this was not so pronounced, but
it was obvious that his father had devoted the previous year to
several unfortunate gambles in oil. Very little of the oil had
been burned, but Stephen Blaine had been rather badly singed. The
next year and the next and the next showed similar decreases, and
Beatrice had for the first time begun using her own money for
keeping up the house. Yet her doctor’s bill for 1913 had been
over nine thousand dollars.
About the exact state of things Mr. Barton was quite vague and
confused. There had been recent investments, the outcome of which
was for the present problematical, and he had an idea there were
further speculations and exchanges concerning which he had not
been consulted.
It was not for several months that Beatrice wrote Amory the full
situation. The entire residue of the Blaine and O’Hara fortunes
consisted of the place at Lake Geneva and approximately a half
million dollars, invested now in fairly conservative six-per-cent
holdings. In fact, Beatrice wrote that she was putting the money
into railroad and street-car bonds as fast as she could
conveniently transfer it.
“I am quite sure,” she wrote to Amory, “that if there is one thing we
can be positive of, it is that people will not stay in one place.
This Ford person has certainly made the most of that idea. So I am
instructing Mr. Barton to specialize on such things as Northern
Pacific and these Rapid Transit Companies, as they call the
street-cars. I shall never forgive myself for not buying Bethlehem
Steel. I’ve heard the most fascinating stories. You must go into
finance, Amory. I’m sure you would revel in it. You start as a
messenger or a teller, I believe, and from that you go up—almost
indefinitely. I’m sure if I were a man I’d love the handling of
money; it has become quite a senile passion with me. Before I get any
farther I want to discuss something. A Mrs. Bispam, an overcordial
little lady whom I met at a tea the other day, told me that her son,
he is at Yale, wrote her that all the boys there wore their summer
underwear all during the winter, and also went about with their heads
wet and in low shoes on the coldest days. Now, Amory, I don’t know
whether that is a fad at Princeton too, but I don’t want you to be so
foolish. It not only inclines a young man to pneumonia and infantile
paralysis, but to all forms of lung trouble, to which you are
particularly inclined. You cannot experiment with your health. I
have found that out. I will not make myself ridiculous as some
mothers no doubt do, by insisting that you wear overshoes, though I
remember one Christmas you wore them around constantly without a
single buckle latched, making such a curious swishing sound, and you
refused to buckle them because it was not the thing to do. The very
next Christmas you would not wear even rubbers, though I begged you.
You are nearly twenty years old now, dear, and I can’t be with you
constantly to find whether you are doing the sensible thing.
“This has been a very _practical_ letter. I warned you in my last
that the lack of money to do the things one wants to makes one quite
prosy and domestic, but there is still plenty for everything if we
are not too extravagant. Take care of yourself, my dear boy, and do
try to write at least _once_ a week, because I imagine all sorts of
horrible things if I don’t hear from you. Affectionately,
MOTHER.”
FIRST APPEARANCE OF THE TERM “PERSONAGE”
Monsignor Darcy invited Amory up to the Stuart palace on the
Hudson for a week at Christmas, and they had enormous
conversations around the open fire. Monsignor was growing a
trifle stouter and his personality had expanded even with that,
and Amory felt both rest and security in sinking into a squat,
cushioned chair and joining him in the middle-aged sanity of a
cigar.
“I’ve felt like leaving college, Monsignor.”
“Why?”
“All my career’s gone up in smoke; you think it’s petty and all
that, but—”
“Not at all petty. I think it’s most important. I want to hear
the whole thing. Everything you’ve been doing since I saw you
last.”
Amory talked; he went thoroughly into the destruction of his
egotistic highways, and in a half-hour the listless quality had
left his voice.
“What would you do if you left college?” asked Monsignor.
“Don’t know. I’d like to travel, but of course this tiresome war
prevents that. Anyways, mother would hate not having me graduate.
I’m just at sea. Kerry Holiday wants me to go over with him and
join the Lafayette Esquadrille.”
“You know you wouldn’t like to go.”
“Sometimes I would—to-night I’d go in a second.”
“Well, you’d have to be very much more tired of life than I think
you are. I know you.”
“I’m afraid you do,” agreed Amory reluctantly. “It just seemed an
easy way out of everything—when I think of another useless,
draggy year.”
“Yes, I know; but to tell you the truth, I’m not worried about
you; you seem to me to be progressing perfectly naturally.”
“No,” Amory objected. “I’ve lost half my personality in a year.”
“Not a bit of it!” scoffed Monsignor. “You’ve lost a great amount
of vanity and that’s all.”
“Lordy! I feel, anyway, as if I’d gone through another fifth form
at St. Regis’s.”
“No.” Monsignor shook his head. “That was a misfortune; this has
been a good thing. Whatever worth while comes to you, won’t be
through the channels you were searching last year.”
“What could be more unprofitable than my present lack of pep?”
“Perhaps in itself... but you’re developing. This has given you
time to think and you’re casting off a lot of your old luggage
about success and the superman and all. People like us can’t
adopt whole theories, as you did. If we can do the next thing,
and have an hour a day to think in, we can accomplish marvels,
but as far as any high-handed scheme of blind dominance is
concerned—we’d just make asses of ourselves.”
“But, Monsignor, I can’t do the next thing.”
“Amory, between you and me, I have only just learned to do it
myself. I can do the one hundred things beyond the next thing,
but I stub my toe on that, just as you stubbed your toe on
mathematics this fall.”
“Why do we have to do the next thing? It never seems the sort of
thing I should do.”
“We have to do it because we’re not personalities, but
personages.”
“That’s a good line—what do you mean?”
“A personality is what you thought you were, what this Kerry and
Sloane you tell me of evidently are. Personality is a physical
matter almost entirely; it lowers the people it acts on—I’ve seen
it vanish in a long sickness. But while a personality is active,
it overrides ‘the next thing.’ Now a personage, on the other
hand, gathers. He is never thought of apart from what he’s done.
He’s a bar on which a thousand things have been hung—glittering
things sometimes, as ours are; but he uses those things with a
cold mentality back of them.”
“And several of my most glittering possessions had fallen off
when I needed them.” Amory continued the simile eagerly.
“Yes, that’s it; when you feel that your garnered prestige and
talents and all that are hung out, you need never bother about
anybody; you can cope with them without difficulty.”
“But, on the other hand, if I haven’t my possessions, I’m
helpless!”
“Absolutely.”
“That’s certainly an idea.”
“Now you’ve a clean start—a start Kerry or Sloane can
constitutionally never have. You brushed three or four ornaments
down, and, in a fit of pique, knocked off the rest of them. The
thing now is to collect some new ones, and the farther you look
ahead in the collecting the better. But remember, do the next
thing!”
“How clear you can make things!”
So they talked, often about themselves, sometimes of philosophy
and religion, and life as respectively a game or a mystery. The
priest seemed to guess Amory’s thoughts before they were clear in
his own head, so closely related were their minds in form and
groove.
“Why do I make lists?” Amory asked him one night. “Lists of all
sorts of things?”
“Because you’re a mediaevalist,” Monsignor answered. “We both
are. It’s the passion for classifying and finding a type.”
“It’s a desire to get something
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