This Side of Paradise
by
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Part 3 out of 6
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 definite."
"It's the nucleus of scholastic philosophy."
"I was beginning to think I was growing eccentric till I came up here.
It was a pose, I guess."
"Don't worry about that; for you not posing may be the biggest pose of
all. Pose--"
"Yes?"
"But do the next thing."
After Amory returned to college he received several letters from
Monsignor which gave him more egotistic food for consumption.
I am afraid that I gave you too much assurance of your inevitable
safety, and you must remember that I did that through faith in
your springs of effort; not in the silly conviction that you will
arrive without struggle. Some nuances of character you will have
to take for granted in yourself, though you must be careful in
confessing them to others. You are unsentimental, almost incapable
of affection, astute without being cunning and vain without being
proud.
Don't let yourself feel worthless; often through life you will
really be at your worst when you seem to think best of yourself;
and don't worry about losing your "personality," as you persist
in calling it; at fifteen you had the radiance of early morning,
at twenty you will begin to have the melancholy brilliance of
the moon, and when you are my age you will give out, as I do,
the genial golden warmth of 4 P.M.
If you write me letters, please let them be natural ones. Your
last, that dissertation on architecture, was perfectly awful--
so "highbrow" that I picture you living in an intellectual and
emotional vacuum; and beware of trying to classify people too
definitely into types; you will find that all through their youth
they will persist annoyingly in jumping from class to class, and
by pasting a supercilious label on every one you meet you are
merely packing a Jack-in-the-box that will spring up and leer at
you when you begin to come into really antagonistic contact with
the world. An idealization of some such a man as Leonardo da
Vinci would be a more valuable beacon to you at present.
You are bound to go up and down, just as I did in my youth, but
do keep your clarity of mind, and if fools or sages dare to
criticise don't blame yourself too much.
You say that convention is all that really keeps you straight in
this "woman proposition"; but it's more than that, Amory; it's
the fear that what you begin you can't stop; you would run amuck,
and I know whereof I speak; it's that half-miraculous sixth sense
by which you detect evil, it's the half-realized fear of God in
your heart.
Whatever your metier proves to be--religion, architecture,
literature--I'm sure you would be much safer anchored to the
Church, but I won't risk my influence by arguing with you even
though I am secretly sure that the "black chasm of Romanism"
yawns beneath you. Do write me soon.
With affectionate regards, THAYER DARCY.
Even Amory's reading paled during this period; he delved further into
the misty side streets of literature: Huysmans, Walter Pater, Theophile
Gautier, and the racier sections of Rabelais, Boccaccio, Petronius,
and Suetonius. One week, through general curiosity, he inspected the
private libraries of his classmates and found Sloane's as typical as any:
sets of Kipling, O. Henry, John Fox, Jr., and Richard Harding Davis;
"What Every Middle-Aged Woman Ought to Know," "The Spell of the Yukon";
a "gift" copy of James Whitcomb Riley, an assortment of battered,
annotated schoolbooks, and, finally, to his surprise, one of his own
late discoveries, the collected poems of Rupert Brooke.
Together with Tom D'Invilliers, he sought among the lights of Princeton
for some one who might found the Great American Poetic Tradition.
The undergraduate body itself was rather more interesting that year than
had been the entirely Philistine Princeton of two years before. Things
had livened surprisingly, though at the sacrifice of much of the
spontaneous charm of freshman year. In the old Princeton they would
never have discovered Tanaduke Wylie. Tanaduke was a sophomore, with
tremendous ears and a way of saying, "The earth swirls down through the
ominous moons of preconsidered generations!" that made them vaguely
wonder why it did not sound quite clear, but never question that it
was the utterance of a supersoul. At least so Tom and Amory took him.
They told him in all earnestness that he had a mind like Shelley's,
and featured his ultrafree free verse and prose poetry in the Nassau
Literary Magazine. But Tanaduke's genius absorbed the many colors of the
age, and he took to the Bohemian life, to their great disappointment.
He talked of Greenwich Village now instead of "noon-swirled moons,"
and met winter muses, unacademic, and cloistered by Forty-second Street
and Broadway, instead of the Shelleyan dream-children with whom he had
regaled their expectant appreciation. So they surrendered Tanaduke to
the futurists, deciding that he and his flaming ties would do better
there. Tom gave him the final advice that he should stop writing for two
years and read the complete works of Alexander Pope four times, but on
Amory's suggestion that Pope for Tanaduke was like foot-ease for stomach
trouble, they withdrew in laughter, and called it a coin's toss whether
this genius was too big or too petty for them.
Amory rather scornfully avoided the popular professors who dispensed easy
epigrams and thimblefuls of Chartreuse to groups of admirers every night.
He was disappointed, too, at the air of general uncertainty on every
subject that seemed linked with the pedantic temperament; his opinions
took shape in a miniature satire called "In a Lecture-Room," which he
persuaded Tom to print in the Nassau Lit.
"Good-morning, Fool . . .
Three times a week
You hold us helpless while you speak,
Teasing our thirsty souls with the
Sleek 'yeas' of your philosophy . . .
Well, here we are, your hundred sheep,
Tune up, play on, pour forth . . . we sleep . . .
You are a student, so they say;
You hammered out the other day
A syllabus, from what we know
Of some forgotten folio;
You'd sniffled through an era's must,
Filling your nostrils up with dust,
And then, arising from your knees,
Published, in one gigantic sneeze . . .
But here's a neighbor on my right,
An Eager Ass, considered bright;
Asker of questions. . . . How he'll stand,
With earnest air and fidgy hand,
After this hour, telling you
He sat all night and burrowed through
Your book. . . . Oh, you'll be coy and he
Will simulate precosity,
And pedants both, you'll smile and smirk,
And leer, and hasten back to work. . . .
'Twas this day week, sir, you returned
A theme of mine, from which I learned
(Through various comment on the side
Which you had scrawled) that I defied
The _highest rules of criticism_
For _cheap_ and _careless_ witticism. . . .
'Are you quite sure that this could be?'
And
'Shaw is no authority!'
But Eager Ass, with what he's sent,
Plays havoc with your best per cent.
Still--still I meet you here and there . . .
When Shakespeare's played you hold a chair,
And some defunct, moth-eaten star
Enchants the mental prig you are . . .
A radical comes down and shocks
The atheistic orthodox?
You're representing Common Sense,
Mouth open, in the audience.
And, sometimes, even chapel lures
That conscious tolerance of yours,
That broad and beaming view of truth
(Including Kant and General Booth . . .)
And so from shock to shock you live,
A hollow, pale affirmative . . .
The hour's up . . . and roused from rest
One hundred children of the blest
Cheat you a word or two with feet
That down the noisy aisle-ways beat . . .
Forget on _narrow-minded earth_
The Mighty Yawn that gave you birth."
In April, Kerry Holiday left college and sailed for France to enroll in
the Lafayette Esquadrille. Amory's envy and admiration of this step was
drowned in an experience of his own to which he never succeeded in giving
an appropriate value, but which, nevertheless, haunted him for three
years afterward.
* * * *
THE DEVIL
Healy's they left at twelve and taxied to Bistolary's. There were Axia
Marlowe and Phoebe Column, from the Summer Garden show, Fred Sloane and
Amory. The evening was so very young that they felt ridiculous with
surplus energy, and burst into the cafe like Dionysian revellers.
"Table for four in the middle of the floor," yelled Phoebe. "Hurry,
old dear, tell 'em we're here!"
"Tell 'em to play 'Admiration'!" shouted Sloane. "You two order; Phoebe
and I are going to shake a wicked calf," and they sailed off in the
muddled crowd. Axia and Amory, acquaintances of an hour, jostled behind
a waiter to a table at a point of vantage; there they took seats and
watched.
"There's Findle Margotson, from New Haven!" she cried above the uproar.
"'Lo, Findle! Whoo-ee!"
"Oh, Axia!" he shouted in salutation. "C'mon over to our table." "No!"
Amory whispered.
"Can't do it, Findle; I'm with somebody else! Call me up to-morrow about
one o'clock!"
Findle, a nondescript man-about-Bisty's, answered incoherently and turned
back to the brilliant blonde whom he was endeavoring to steer around the
room.
"There's a natural damn fool," commented Amory.
"Oh, he's all right. Here's the old jitney waiter. If you ask me,
I want a double Daiquiri."
"Make it four."
The crowd whirled and changed and shifted. They were mostly from the
colleges, with a scattering of the male refuse of Broadway, and women of
two types, the higher of which was the chorus girl. On the whole it was
a typical crowd, and their party as typical as any. About three-fourths
of the whole business was for effect and therefore harmless, ended at the
door of the cafe, soon enough for the five-o'clock train back to Yale
or Princeton; about one-fourth continued on into the dimmer hours and
gathered strange dust from strange places. Their party was scheduled
to be one of the harmless kind. Fred Sloane and Phoebe Column were old
friends; Axia and Amory new ones. But strange things are prepared even
in the dead of night, and the unusual, which lurks least in the cafe,
home of the prosaic and inevitable, was preparing to spoil for him
the waning romance of Broadway. The way it took was so inexpressibly
terrible, so unbelievable, that afterward he never thought of it as
experience; but it was a scene from a misty tragedy, played far behind
the veil, and that it meant something definite he knew.
About one o'clock they moved to Maxim's, and two found them in
Deviniere's. Sloane had been drinking consecutively and was in a state
of unsteady exhilaration, but Amory was quite tiresomely sober; they had
run across none of those ancient, corrupt buyers of champagne who usually
assisted their New York parties. They were just through dancing and
were making their way back to their chairs when Amory became aware that
some one at a near-by table was looking at him. He turned and glanced
casually . . . a middle-aged man dressed in a brown sack suit, it was,
sitting a little apart at a table by himself and watching their party
intently. At Amory's glance he smiled faintly. Amory turned to Fred,
who was just sitting down.
"Who's that pale fool watching us?" he complained indignantly.
"Where?" cried Sloane. "We'll have him thrown out!" He rose to his feet
and swayed back and forth, clinging to his chair. "Where is he?"
Axia and Phoebe suddenly leaned and whispered to each other across the
table, and before Amory realized it they found themselves on their way to
the door.
"Where now?"
"Up to the flat," suggested Phoebe. "We've got brandy and fizz--and
everything's slow down here to-night."
Amory considered quickly. He hadn't been drinking, and decided that if
he took no more, it would be reasonably discreet for him to trot along in
the party. In fact, it would be, perhaps, the thing to do in order to
keep an eye on Sloane, who was not in a state to do his own thinking.
So he took Axia's arm and, piling intimately into a taxicab, they drove
out over the hundreds and drew up at a tall, white-stone apartment-house.
. . . Never would he forget that street. . . . It was a broad street,
lined on both sides with just such tall, white-stone buildings, dotted
with dark windows; they stretched along as far as the eye could see,
flooded with a bright moonlight that gave them a calcium pallor. He
imagined each one to have an elevator and a colored hall-boy and a
key-rack; each one to be eight stories high and full of three and four
room suites. He was rather glad to walk into the cheeriness of Phoebe's
living-room and sink onto a sofa, while the girls went rummaging for food.
"Phoebe's great stuff," confided Sloane, sotto voce.
"I'm only going to stay half an hour," Amory said sternly. He wondered
if it sounded priggish.
"Hell y' say," protested Sloane. "We're here now--don't le's rush."
"I don't like this place," Amory said sulkily, "and I don't want any
food."
Phoebe reappeared with sandwiches, brandy bottle, siphon, and four
glasses.
"Amory, pour 'em out," she said, "and we'll drink to Fred Sloane, who has
a rare, distinguished edge."
"Yes," said Axia, coming in, "and Amory. I like Amory." She sat down
beside him and laid her yellow head on his shoulder.
"I'll pour," said Sloane; "you use siphon, Phoebe."
They filled the tray with glasses.
"Ready, here she goes!"
Amory hesitated, glass in hand.
There was a minute while temptation crept over him like a warm wind,
and his imagination turned to fire, and he took the glass from Phoebe's
hand. That was all; for at the second that his decision came, he looked
up and saw, ten yards from him, the man who had been in the cafe, and
with his jump of astonishment the glass fell from his uplifted hand.
There the man half sat, half leaned against a pile of pillows on the
corner divan. His face was cast in the same yellow wax as in the cafe,
neither the dull, pasty color of a dead man--rather a sort of virile
pallor--nor unhealthy, you'd have called it; but like a strong man who'd
worked in a mine or done night shifts in a damp climate. Amory looked
him over carefully and later he could have drawn him after a fashion,
down to the merest details. His mouth was the kind that is called frank,
and he had steady gray eyes that moved slowly from one to the other of
their group, with just the shade of a questioning expression. Amory
noticed his hands; they weren't fine at all, but they had versatility
and a tenuous strength . . . they were nervous hands that sat lightly
along the cushions and moved constantly with little jerky openings and
closings. Then, suddenly, Amory perceived the feet, and with a rush of
blood to the head he realized he was afraid. The feet were all wrong
. . . with a sort of wrongness that he felt rather than knew. . . .
It was like weakness in a good woman, or blood on satin; one of those
terrible incongruities that shake little things in the back of the brain.
He wore no shoes, but, instead, a sort of half moccasin, pointed, though,
like the shoes they wore in the fourteenth century, and with the little
ends curling up. They were a darkish brown and his toes seemed to fill
them to the end. . . . They were unutterably terrible. . . .
He must have said something, or looked something, for Axia's voice came
out of the void with a strange goodness.
"Well, look at Amory! Poor old Amory's sick--old head going 'round?"
"Look at that man!" cried Amory, pointing toward the corner divan.
"You mean that purple zebra!" shrieked Axia facetiously. "Ooo-ee!
Amory's got a purple zebra watching him!"
Sloane laughed vacantly.
"Ole zebra gotcha, Amory?"
There was a silence. . . . The man regarded Amory quizzically. . . .
Then the human voices fell faintly on his ear:
"Thought you weren't drinking," remarked Axia sardonically, but her voice
was good to hear; the whole divan that held the man was alive; alive like
heat waves over asphalt, like wriggling worms. . . .
"Come back! Come back!" Axia's arm fell on his. "Amory, dear, you
aren't going, Amory!" He was half-way to the door.
"Come on, Amory, stick 'th us!"
"Sick, are you?"
"Sit down a second!"
"Take some water."
"Take a little brandy. . . ."
The elevator was close, and the colored boy was half asleep, paled to
a livid bronze . . . Axia's beseeching voice floated down the shaft.
Those feet . . . those feet . . .
As they settled to the lower floor the feet came into view in the sickly
electric light of the paved hall.
* * * *
IN THE ALLEY
Down the long street came the moon, and Amory turned his back on it and
walked. Ten, fifteen steps away sounded the footsteps. They were like a
slow dripping, with just the slightest insistence in their fall. Amory's
shadow lay, perhaps, ten feet ahead of him, and soft shoes was presumably
that far behind. With the instinct of a child Amory edged in under the
blue darkness of the white buildings, cleaving the moonlight for haggard
seconds, once bursting into a slow run with clumsy stumblings. After
that he stopped suddenly; he must keep hold, he thought. His lips were
dry and he licked them.
If he met any one good--were there any good people left in the world or
did they all live in white apartment-houses now? Was every one followed
in the moonlight? But if he met some one good who'd know what he meant
and hear this damned scuffle . . . then the scuffling grew suddenly
nearer, and a black cloud settled over the moon. When again the pale
sheen skimmed the cornices, it was almost beside him, and Amory thought
he heard a quiet breathing. Suddenly he realized that the footsteps were
not behind, had never been behind, they were ahead and he was not eluding
but following . . . following. He began to run, blindly, his heart
knocking heavily, his hands clinched. Far ahead a black dot showed
itself, resolved slowly into a human shape. But Amory was beyond that
now; he turned off the street and darted into an alley, narrow and
dark and smelling of old rottenness. He twisted down a long, sinuous
blackness, where the moonlight was shut away except for tiny glints
and patches . . . then suddenly sank panting into a corner by a fence,
exhausted. The steps ahead stopped, and he could hear them shift
slightly with a continuous motion, like waves around a dock.
He put his face in his hands and covered eyes and ears as well as he
could. During all this time it never occurred to him that he was
delirious or drunk. He had a sense of reality such as material things
could never give him. His intellectual content seemed to submit
passively to it, and it fitted like a glove everything that had ever
preceded it in his life. It did not muddle him. It was like a problem
whose answer he knew on paper, yet whose solution he was unable to grasp.
He was far beyond horror. He had sunk through the thin surface of that,
now moved in a region where the feet and the fear of white walls were
real, living things, things he must accept. Only far inside his soul a
little fire leaped and cried that something was pulling him down, trying
to get him inside a door and slam it behind him. After that door
was slammed there would be only footfalls and white buildings in the
moonlight, and perhaps he would be one of the footfalls.
During the five or ten minutes he waited in the shadow of the fence,
there was somehow this fire . . . that was as near as he could name it
afterward. He remembered calling aloud:
"I want some one stupid. Oh, send some one stupid!" This to the
black fence opposite him, in whose shadows the footsteps shuffled
. . . shuffled. He supposed "stupid" and "good" had become somehow
intermingled through previous association. When he called thus it was
not an act of will at all--will had turned him away from the moving
figure in the street; it was almost instinct that called, just the pile
on pile of inherent tradition or some wild prayer from way over the
night. Then something clanged like a low gong struck at a distance,
and before his eyes a face flashed over the two feet, a face pale and
distorted with a sort of infinite evil that twisted it like flame in the
wind; _but he knew, for the half instant that the gong tanged and hummed,
that it was the face of Dick Humbird._
Minutes later he sprang to his feet, realizing dimly that there was no
more sound, and that he was alone in the graying alley. It was cold,
and he started on a steady run for the light that showed the street at
the other end.
* * * *
AT THE WINDOW
It was late morning when he woke and found the telephone beside his bed
in the hotel tolling frantically, and remembered that he had left word
to be called at eleven. Sloane was snoring heavily, his clothes in a
pile by his bed. They dressed and ate breakfast in silence, and then
sauntered out to get some air. Amory's mind was working slowly, trying
to assimilate what had happened and separate from the chaotic imagery
that stacked his memory the bare shreds of truth. If the morning had
been cold and gray he could have grasped the reins of the past in an
instant, but it was one of those days that New York gets sometimes in May,
when the air on Fifth Avenue is a soft, light wine. How much or how
little Sloane remembered Amory did not care to know; he apparently had
none of the nervous tension that was gripping Amory and forcing his mind
back and forth like a shrieking saw.
Then Broadway broke upon them, and with the babel of noise and the
painted faces a sudden sickness rushed over Amory.
"For God's sake, let's go back! Let's get off of this--this place!"
Sloane looked at him in amazement.
"What do you mean?"
"This street, it's ghastly! Come on! let's get back to the Avenue!"
"Do you mean to say," said Sloane stolidly, "that 'cause you had some
sort of indigestion that made you act like a maniac last night, you're
never coming on Broadway again?"
Simultaneously Amory classed him with the crowd, and he seemed no longer
Sloane of the debonair humor and the happy personality, but only one of
the evil faces that whirled along the turbid stream.
"Man!" he shouted so loud that the people on the corner turned and
followed them with their eyes, "it's filthy, and if you can't see it,
you're filthy, too!"
"I can't help it," said Sloane doggedly. "What's the matter with you?
Old remorse getting you? You'd be in a fine state if you'd gone through
with our little party."
"I'm going, Fred," said Amory slowly. His knees were shaking under him,
and he knew that if he stayed another minute on this street he would keel
over where he stood. "I'll be at the Vanderbilt for lunch." And he
strode rapidly off and turned over to Fifth Avenue. Back at the hotel he
felt better, but as he walked into the barber-shop, intending to get a
head massage, the smell of the powders and tonics brought back Axia's
sidelong, suggestive smile, and he left hurriedly. In the doorway of his
room a sudden blackness flowed around him like a divided river.
When he came to himself he knew that several hours had passed. He
pitched onto the bed and rolled over on his face with a deadly fear that
he was going mad. He wanted people, people, some one sane and stupid and
good. He lay for he knew not how long without moving. He could feel
the little hot veins on his forehead standing out, and his terror had
hardened on him like plaster. He felt he was passing up again through
the thin crust of horror, and now only could he distinguish the shadowy
twilight he was leaving. He must have fallen asleep again, for when he
next recollected himself he had paid the hotel bill and was stepping into
a taxi at the door. It was raining torrents.
On the train for Princeton he saw no one he knew, only a crowd of
fagged-looking Philadelphians. The presence of a painted woman across
the aisle filled him with a fresh burst of sickness and he changed to
another car, tried to concentrate on an article in a popular magazine.
He found himself reading the same paragraphs over and over, so he
abandoned this attempt and leaning over wearily pressed his hot forehead
against the damp window-pane. The car, a smoker, was hot and stuffy with
most of the smells of the state's alien population; he opened a window
and shivered against the cloud of fog that drifted in over him. The two
hours' ride were like days, and he nearly cried aloud with joy when the
towers of Princeton loomed up beside him and the yellow squares of light
filtered through the blue rain.
Tom was standing in the centre of the room, pensively relighting a
cigar-stub. Amory fancied he looked rather relieved on seeing him.
"Had a hell of a dream about you last night," came in the cracked voice
through the cigar smoke. "I had an idea you were in some trouble."
"Don't tell me about it!" Amory almost shrieked. "Don't say a word;
I'm tired and pepped out."
Tom looked at him queerly and then sank into a chair and opened his
Italian note-book. Amory threw his coat and hat on the floor, loosened
his collar, and took a Wells novel at random from the shelf. "Wells is
sane," he thought, "and if he won't do I'll read Rupert Brooke."
Half an hour passed. Outside the wind came up, and Amory started as the
wet branches moved and clawed with their finger-nails at the window-pane.
Tom was deep in his work, and inside the room only the occasional scratch
of a match or the rustle of leather as they shifted in their chairs broke
the stillness. Then like a zigzag of lightning came the change. Amory
sat bolt upright, frozen cold in his chair. Tom was looking at him with
his mouth drooping, eyes fixed.
"God help us!" Amory cried.
"Oh, my heavens!" shouted Tom, "look behind!" Quick as a flash Amory
whirled around. He saw nothing but the dark window-pane. "It's gone
now," came Tom's voice after a second in a still terror. "Something was
looking at you."
Trembling violently, Amory dropped into his chair again.
"I've got to tell you," he said. "I've had one hell of an experience.
I think I've--I've seen the devil or--something like him. What face did
you just see?--or no," he added quickly, "don't tell me!"
And he gave Tom the story. It was midnight when he finished, and after
that, with all lights burning, two sleepy, shivering boys read to each
other from "The New Machiavelli," until dawn came up out of Witherspoon
Hall, and the Princetonian fell against the door, and the May birds
hailed the sun on last night's rain.
BOOK ONE
The Romantic Egotist
CHAPTER 4
Narcissus Off Duty
During Princeton's transition period, that is, during Amory's last two
years there, while he saw it change and broaden and live up to its Gothic
beauty by better means than night parades, certain individuals arrived
who stirred it to its plethoric depths. Some of them had been freshmen,
and wild freshmen, with Amory; some were in the class below; and it was
in the beginning of his last year and around small tables at the Nassau
Inn that they began questioning aloud the institutions that Amory and
countless others before him had questioned so long in secret. First,
and partly by accident, they struck on certain books, a definite type of
biographical novel that Amory christened "quest" books. In the "quest"
book the hero set off in life armed with the best weapons and avowedly
intending to use them as such weapons are usually used, to push their
possessors ahead as selfishly and blindly as possible, but the heroes
of the "quest" books discovered that there might be a more magnificent
use for them. "None Other Gods," "Sinister Street," and "The Research
Magnificent" were examples of such books; it was the latter of these
three that gripped Burne Holiday and made him wonder in the beginning
of senior year how much it was worth while being a diplomatic autocrat
around his club on Prospect Avenue and basking in the high lights of
class office. It was distinctly through the channels of aristocracy that
Burne found his way. Amory, through Kerry, had had a vague drifting
acquaintance with him, but not until January of senior year did their
friendship commence.
"Heard the latest?" said Tom, coming in late one drizzly evening with
that triumphant air he always wore after a successful conversational bout.
"No. Somebody flunked out? Or another ship sunk?"
"Worse than that. About one-third of the junior class are going to
resign from their clubs."
"What!"
"Actual fact!"
"Why!"
"Spirit of reform and all that. Burne Holiday is behind it. The club
presidents are holding a meeting to-night to see if they can find a joint
means of combating it."
"Well, what's the idea of the thing?"
"Oh, clubs injurious to Princeton democracy; cost a lot; draw social
lines, take time; the regular line you get sometimes from disappointed
sophomores. Woodrow thought they should be abolished and all that."
"But this is the real thing?"
"Absolutely. I think it'll go through."
"For Pete's sake, tell me more about it."
"Well," began Tom, "it seems that the idea developed simultaneously in
several heads. I was talking to Burne awhile ago, and he claims that
it's a logical result if an intelligent person thinks long enough about
the social system. They had a 'discussion crowd' and the point of
abolishing the clubs was brought up by some one--everybody there leaped
at it--it had been in each one's mind, more or less, and it just needed
a spark to bring it out."
"Fine! I swear I think it'll be most entertaining. How do they feel up
at Cap and Gown?"
"Wild, of course. Every one's been sitting and arguing and swearing and
getting mad and getting sentimental and getting brutal. It's the same at
all the clubs; I've been the rounds. They get one of the radicals in the
corner and fire questions at him."
"How do the radicals stand up?"
"Oh, moderately well. Burne's a damn good talker, and so obviously
sincere that you can't get anywhere with him. It's so evident that
resigning from his club means so much more to him than preventing it does
to us that I felt futile when I argued; finally took a position that was
brilliantly neutral. In fact, I believe Burne thought for a while that
he'd converted me."
"And you say almost a third of the junior class are going to resign?"
"Call it a fourth and be safe."
"Lord--who'd have thought it possible!"
There was a brisk knock at the door, and Burne himself came in. "Hello,
Amory--hello, Tom."
Amory rose.
"'Evening, Burne. Don't mind if I seem to rush; I'm going to Renwick's."
Burne turned to him quickly.
"You probably know what I want to talk to Tom about, and it isn't a bit
private. I wish you'd stay."
"I'd be glad to." Amory sat down again, and as Burne perched on a table
and launched into argument with Tom, he looked at this revolutionary more
carefully than he ever had before. Broad-browed and strong-chinned,
with a fineness in the honest gray eyes that were like Kerry's, Burne was
a man who gave an immediate impression of bigness and security--stubborn,
that was evident, but his stubbornness wore no stolidity, and when he had
talked for five minutes Amory knew that this keen enthusiasm had in it no
quality of dilettantism.
The intense power Amory felt later in Burne Holiday differed from the
admiration he had had for Humbird. This time it began as purely a mental
interest. With other men of whom he had thought as primarily first-class,
he had been attracted first by their personalities, and in Burne he
missed that immediate magnetism to which he usually swore allegiance.
But that night Amory was struck by Burne's intense earnestness, a quality
he was accustomed to associate only with the dread stupidity, and by
the great enthusiasm that struck dead chords in his heart. Burne stood
vaguely for a land Amory hoped he was drifting toward--and it was almost
time that land was in sight. Tom and Amory and Alec had reached an
impasse; never did they seem to have new experiences in common, for Tom
and Alec had been as blindly busy with their committees and boards as
Amory had been blindly idling, and the things they had for dissection--
college, contemporary personality and the like--they had hashed and
rehashed for many a frugal conversational meal.
That night they discussed the clubs until twelve, and, in the main,
they agreed with Burne. To the roommates it did not seem such a vital
subject as it had in the two years before, but the logic of Burne's
objections to the social system dovetailed so completely with everything
they had thought, that they questioned rather than argued, and envied
the sanity that enabled this man to stand out so against all traditions.
Then Amory branched off and found that Burne was deep in other things
as well. Economics had interested him and he was turning socialist.
Pacifism played in the back of his mind, and he read The Masses and Lyoff
Tolstoi faithfully.
"How about religion?" Amory asked him.
"Don't know. I'm in a muddle about a lot of things--I've just discovered
that I've a mind, and I'm starting to read."
"Read what?"
"Everything. I have to pick and choose, of course, but mostly things to
make me think. I'm reading the four gospels now, and the 'Varieties of
Religious Experience.'"
"What chiefly started you?"
"Wells, I guess, and Tolstoi, and a man named Edward Carpenter. I've
been reading for over a year now--on a few lines, on what I consider the
essential lines."
"Poetry?"
"Well, frankly, not what you call poetry, or for your reasons--you two
write, of course, and look at things differently. Whitman is the man
that attracts me."
"Whitman?"
"Yes; he's a definite ethical force."
"Well, I'm ashamed to say that I'm a blank on the subject of Whitman.
How about you, Tom?"
Tom nodded sheepishly.
"Well," continued Burne, "you may strike a few poems that are tiresome,
but I mean the mass of his work. He's tremendous--like Tolstoi. They
both look things in the face, and, somehow, different as they are,
stand for somewhat the same things."
"You have me stumped, Burne," Amory admitted. "I've read 'Anna Karenina'
and the 'Kreutzer Sonata' of course, but Tolstoi is mostly in the
original Russian as far as I'm concerned."
"He's the greatest man in hundreds of years," cried Burne enthusiastically.
"Did you ever see a picture of that shaggy old head of his?"
They talked until three, from biology to organized religion, and when
Amory crept shivering into bed it was with his mind aglow with ideas and
a sense of shock that some one else had discovered the path he might
have followed. Burne Holiday was so evidently developing--and Amory
had considered that he was doing the same. He had fallen into a deep
cynicism over what had crossed his path, plotted the imperfectability of
man and read Shaw and Chesterton enough to keep his mind from the edges
of decadence--now suddenly all his mental processes of the last year and
a half seemed stale and futile--a petty consummation of himself . . .
and like a sombre background lay that incident of the spring before,
that filled half his nights with a dreary terror and made him unable
to pray. He was not even a Catholic, yet that was the only ghost of a
code that he had, the gaudy, ritualistic, paradoxical Catholicism whose
prophet was Chesterton, whose claqueurs were such reformed rakes of
literature as Huysmans and Bourget, whose American sponsor was Ralph
Adams Cram, with his adulation of thirteenth-century cathedrals--a
Catholicism which Amory found convenient and ready-made, without priest
or sacraments or sacrifice.
He could not sleep, so he turned on his reading-lamp and, taking down
the "Kreutzer Sonata," searched it carefully for the germs of Burne's
enthusiasm. Being Burne was suddenly so much realler than being clever.
Yet he sighed . . . here were other possible clay feet.
He thought back through two years, of Burne as a hurried, nervous
freshman, quite submerged in his brother's personality. Then he
remembered an incident of sophomore year, in which Burne had been
suspected of the leading role.
Dean Hollister had been heard by a large group arguing with a taxi-driver,
who had driven him from the junction. In the course of the altercation
the dean remarked that he "might as well buy the taxicab." He paid and
walked off, but next morning he entered his private office to find the
taxicab itself in the space usually occupied by his desk, bearing a sign
which read "Property of Dean Hollister. Bought and Paid for." . . .
It took two expert mechanics half a day to dissemble it into its minutest
parts and remove it, which only goes to prove the rare energy of
sophomore humor under efficient leadership.
Then again, that very fall, Burne had caused a sensation. A certain
Phyllis Styles, an intercollegiate prom-trotter, had failed to get her
yearly invitation to the Harvard-Princeton game.
Jesse Ferrenby had brought her to a smaller game a few weeks before,
and had pressed Burne into service--to the ruination of the latter's
misogyny.
"Are you coming to the Harvard game?" Burne had asked indiscreetly,
merely to make conversation.
"If you ask me," cried Phyllis quickly.
"Of course I do," said Burne feebly. He was unversed in the arts of
Phyllis, and was sure that this was merely a vapid form of kidding.
Before an hour had passed he knew that he was indeed involved. Phyllis
had pinned him down and served him up, informed him the train she was
arriving by, and depressed him thoroughly. Aside from loathing Phyllis,
he had particularly wanted to stag that game and entertain some Harvard
friends.
"She'll see," he informed a delegation who arrived in his room to josh
him. "This will be the last game she ever persuades any young innocent
to take her to!"
"But, Burne--why did you _invite_ her if you didn't want her?"
"Burne, you _know_ you're secretly mad about her--that's the _real_
trouble."
"What can _you_ do, Burne? What can _you_ do against Phyllis?"
But Burne only shook his head and muttered threats which consisted
largely of the phrase: "She'll see, she'll see!"
The blithesome Phyllis bore her twenty-five summers gayly from the train,
but on the platform a ghastly sight met her eyes. There were Burne and
Fred Sloane arrayed to the last dot like the lurid figures on college
posters. They had bought flaring suits with huge peg-top trousers and
gigantic padded shoulders. On their heads were rakish college hats,
pinned up in front and sporting bright orange-and-black bands, while from
their celluloid collars blossomed flaming orange ties. They wore black
arm-bands with orange "P's," and carried canes flying Princeton pennants,
the effect completed by socks and peeping handkerchiefs in the same color
motifs. On a clanking chain they led a large, angry tom-cat, painted to
represent a tiger.
A good half of the station crowd was already staring at them, torn
between horrified pity and riotous mirth, and as Phyllis, with her svelte
jaw dropping, approached, the pair bent over and emitted a college cheer
in loud, far-carrying voices, thoughtfully adding the name "Phyllis"
to the end. She was vociferously greeted and escorted enthusiastically
across the campus, followed by half a hundred village urchins--to the
stifled laughter of hundreds of alumni and visitors, half of whom had no
idea that this was a practical joke, but thought that Burne and Fred were
two varsity sports showing their girl a collegiate time.
Phyllis's feelings as she was paraded by the Harvard and Princeton stands,
where sat dozens of her former devotees, can be imagined. She tried to
walk a little ahead, she tried to walk a little behind--but they stayed
close, that there should be no doubt whom she was with, talking in loud
voices of their friends on the football team, until she could almost hear
her acquaintances whispering:
"Phyllis Styles must be _awfully hard up_ to have to come with _those
two_."
That had been Burne, dynamically humorous, fundamentally serious.
From that root had blossomed the energy that he was now trying to orient
with progress. . . .
So the weeks passed and March came and the clay feet that Amory looked
for failed to appear. About a hundred juniors and seniors resigned
from their clubs in a final fury of righteousness, and the clubs in
helplessness turned upon Burne their finest weapon: ridicule. Every one
who knew him liked him--but what he stood for (and he began to stand for
more all the time) came under the lash of many tongues, until a frailer
man than he would have been snowed under.
"Don't you mind losing prestige?" asked Amory one night. They had taken
to exchanging calls several times a week.
"Of course I don't. What's prestige, at best?"
"Some people say that you're just a rather original politician."
He roared with laughter.
"That's what Fred Sloane told me to-day. I suppose I have it coming."
One afternoon they dipped into a subject that had interested Amory for a
long time--the matter of the bearing of physical attributes on a man's
make-up. Burne had gone into the biology of this, and then:
"Of course health counts--a healthy man has twice the chance of being
good," he said.
"I don't agree with you--I don't believe in 'muscular Christianity.'"
"I do--I believe Christ had great physical vigor."
"Oh, no," Amory protested. "He worked too hard for that. I imagine that
when he died he was a broken-down man--and the great saints haven't been
strong."
"Half of them have."
"Well, even granting that, I don't think health has anything to do with
goodness; of course, it's valuable to a great saint to be able to stand
enormous strains, but this fad of popular preachers rising on their toes
in simulated virility, bellowing that calisthenics will save the world--
no, Burne, I can't go that."
"Well, let's waive it--we won't get anywhere, and besides I haven't quite
made up my mind about it myself. Now, here's something I _do_ know--
personal appearance has a lot to do with it."
"Coloring?" Amory asked eagerly.
"Yes."
"That's what Tom and I figured," Amory agreed. "We took the year-books
for the last ten years and looked at the pictures of the senior council.
I know you don't think much of that august body, but it does represent
success here in a general way. Well, I suppose only about thirty-five
per cent of every class here are blonds, are really light--yet _two-
thirds_ of every senior council are light. We looked at pictures of
ten years of them, mind you; that means that out of every _fifteen_
light-haired men in the senior class _one_ is on the senior council,
and of the dark-haired men it's only one in _fifty_."
"It's true," Burne agreed. "The light-haired man _is_ a higher type,
generally speaking. I worked the thing out with the Presidents of the
United States once, and found that way over half of them were light-
haired--yet think of the preponderant number of brunettes in the race."
"People unconsciously admit it," said Amory. "You'll notice a blond
person is _expected_ to talk. If a blond girl doesn't talk we call her a
'doll'; if a light-haired man is silent he's considered stupid. Yet the
world is full of 'dark silent men' and 'languorous brunettes' who haven't
a brain in their heads, but somehow are never accused of the dearth."
"And the large mouth and broad chin and rather big nose undoubtedly make
the superior face."
"I'm not so sure." Amory was all for classical features.
"Oh, yes--I'll show you," and Burne pulled out of his desk a photographic
collection of heavily bearded, shaggy celebrities--Tolstoi, Whitman,
Carpenter, and others.
"Aren't they wonderful?"
Amory tried politely to appreciate them, and gave up laughingly.
"Burne, I think they're the ugliest-looking crowd I ever came across.
They look like an old man's home."
"Oh, Amory, look at that forehead on Emerson; look at Tolstoi's eyes."
His tone was reproachful.
Amory shook his head.
"No! Call them remarkable-looking or anything you want--but ugly they
certainly are."
Unabashed, Burne ran his hand lovingly across the spacious foreheads,
and piling up the pictures put them back in his desk.
Walking at night was one of his favorite pursuits, and one night he
persuaded Amory to accompany him.
"I hate the dark," Amory objected. "I didn't use to--except when I was
particularly imaginative, but now, I really do--I'm a regular fool about
it."
"That's useless, you know."
"Quite possibly."
"We'll go east," Burne suggested, "and down that string of roads through
the woods."
"Doesn't sound very appealing to me," admitted Amory reluctantly, "but
let's go."
They set off at a good gait, and for an hour swung along in a brisk
argument until the lights of Princeton were luminous white blots behind
them.
"Any person with any imagination is bound to be afraid," said Burne
earnestly. "And this very walking at night is one of the things I was
afraid about. I'm going to tell you why I can walk anywhere now and not
be afraid."
"Go on," Amory urged eagerly. They were striding toward the woods,
Burne's nervous, enthusiastic voice warming to his subject.
"I used to come out here alone at night, oh, three months ago, and I
always stopped at that cross-road we just passed. There were the woods
looming up ahead, just as they do now, there were dogs howling and
the shadows and no human sound. Of course, I peopled the woods with
everything ghastly, just like you do; don't you?"
"I do," Amory admitted.
"Well, I began analyzing it--my imagination persisted in sticking horrors
into the dark--so I stuck my imagination into the dark instead, and let
it look out at me--I let it play stray dog or escaped convict or ghost,
and then saw myself coming along the road. That made it all right--
as it always makes everything all right to project yourself completely
into another's place. I knew that if I were the dog or the convict or
the ghost I wouldn't be a menace to Burne Holiday any more than he was a
menace to me. Then I thought of my watch. I'd better go back and leave
it and then essay the woods. No; I decided, it's better on the whole
that I should lose a watch than that I should turn back--and I did go
into them--not only followed the road through them, but walked into them
until I wasn't frightened any more--did it until one night I sat down and
dozed off in there; then I knew I was through being afraid of the dark."
"Lordy," Amory breathed. "I couldn't have done that. I'd have come
out half-way, and the first time an automobile passed and made the dark
thicker when its lamps disappeared, I'd have come in."
"Well," Burne said suddenly, after a few moments' silence, "we're
half-way through, let's turn back."
On the return he launched into a discussion of will.
"It's the whole thing," he asserted. "It's the one dividing line between
good and evil. I've never met a man who led a rotten life and didn't
have a weak will."
"How about great criminals?"
"They're usually insane. If not, they're weak. There is no such thing
as a strong, sane criminal."
"Burne, I disagree with you altogether; how about the superman?"
"Well?"
"He's evil, I think, yet he's strong and sane."
"I've never met him. I'll bet, though, that he's stupid or insane."
"I've met him over and over and he's neither. That's why I think you're
wrong."
"I'm sure I'm not--and so I don't believe in imprisonment except for the
insane."
On this point Amory could not agree. It seemed to him that life and
history were rife with the strong criminal, keen, but often self-deluding;
in politics and business one found him and among the old statesmen and
kings and generals; but Burne never agreed and their courses began to
split on that point.
Burne was drawing farther and farther away from the world about him.
He resigned the vice-presidency of the senior class and took to reading
and walking as almost his only pursuits. He voluntarily attended
graduate lectures in philosophy and biology, and sat in all of them
with a rather pathetically intent look in his eyes, as if waiting for
something the lecturer would never quite come to. Sometimes Amory would
see him squirm in his seat; and his face would light up; he was on fire
to debate a point.
He grew more abstracted on the street and was even accused of becoming
a snob, but Amory knew it was nothing of the sort, and once when Burne
passed him four feet off, absolutely unseeingly, his mind a thousand
miles away, Amory almost choked with the romantic joy of watching him.
Burne seemed to be climbing heights where others would be forever unable
to get a foothold.
"I tell you," Amory declared to Tom, "he's the first contemporary I've
ever met whom I'll admit is my superior in mental capacity."
"It's a bad time to admit it--people are beginning to think he's odd."
"He's way over their heads--you know you think so yourself when you
talk to him--Good Lord, Tom, you _used_ to stand out against 'people.'
Success has completely conventionalized you."
Tom grew rather annoyed.
"What's he trying to do--be excessively holy?"
"No! not like anybody you've ever seen. Never enters the Philadelphian
Society. He has no faith in that rot. He doesn't believe that public
swimming-pools and a kind word in time will right the wrongs of the world;
moreover, he takes a drink whenever he feels like it."
"He certainly is getting in wrong."
"Have you talked to him lately?"
"No."
"Then you haven't any conception of him."
The argument ended nowhere, but Amory noticed more than ever how the
sentiment toward Burne had changed on the campus.
"It's odd," Amory said to Tom one night when they had grown more amicable
on the subject, "that the people who violently disapprove of Burne's
radicalism are distinctly the Pharisee class--I mean they're the
best-educated men in college--the editors of the papers, like yourself
and Ferrenby, the younger professors. . . . The illiterate athletes like
Langueduc think he's getting eccentric, but they just say, 'Good old
Burne has got some queer ideas in his head,' and pass on--the Pharisee
class--Gee! they ridicule him unmercifully."
The next morning he met Burne hurrying along McCosh walk after a
recitation.
"Whither bound, Tsar?"
"Over to the Prince office to see Ferrenby," he waved a copy of the
morning's Princetonian at Amory. "He wrote this editorial."
"Going to flay him alive?"
"No--but he's got me all balled up. Either I've misjudged him or he's
suddenly become the world's worst radical."
Burne hurried on, and it was several days before Amory heard an account
of the ensuing conversation. Burne had come into the editor's sanctum
displaying the paper cheerfully.
"Hello, Jesse."
"Hello there, Savonarola."
"I just read your editorial."
"Good boy--didn't know you stooped that low."
"Jesse, you startled me."
"How so?"
"Aren't you afraid the faculty'll get after you if you pull this
irreligious stuff?"
"What?"
"Like this morning."
"What the devil--that editorial was on the coaching system."
"Yes, but that quotation--"
Jesse sat up.
"What quotation?"
"You know: 'He who is not with me is against me.'"
"Well--what about it?"
Jesse was puzzled but not alarmed.
"Well, you say here--let me see." Burne opened the paper and read:
"'_He who is not with me is against me_, as that gentleman said who
was notoriously capable of only coarse distinctions and puerile
generalities.'"
"What of it?" Ferrenby began to look alarmed. "Oliver Cromwell said it,
didn't he? or was it Washington, or one of the saints? Good Lord,
I've forgotten."
Burne roared with laughter.
"Oh, Jesse, oh, good, kind Jesse."
"Who said it, for Pete's sake?"
"Well," said Burne, recovering his voice, "St. Matthew attributes it to
Christ."
"My God!" cried Jesse, and collapsed backward into the waste-basket.
* * * *
AMORY WRITES A POEM
The weeks tore by. Amory wandered occasionally to New York on the chance
of finding a new shining green auto-bus, that its stick-of-candy glamour
might penetrate his disposition. One day he ventured into a stock-
company revival of a play whose name was faintly familiar. The curtain
rose--he watched casually as a girl entered. A few phrases rang in his
ear and touched a faint chord of memory. Where--? When--?
Then he seemed to hear a voice whispering beside him, a very soft,
vibrant voice: "Oh, I'm such a poor little fool; _do_ tell me when I do
wrong."
The solution came in a flash and he had a quick, glad memory of Isabelle.
He found a blank space on his programme, and began to scribble rapidly:
"Here in the figured dark I watch once more,
There, with the curtain, roll the years away;
Two years of years--there was an idle day
Of ours, when happy endings didn't bore
Our unfermented souls; I could adore
Your eager face beside me, wide-eyed, gay,
Smiling a repertoire while the poor play
Reached me as a faint ripple reaches shore.
"Yawning and wondering an evening through,
I watch alone . . . and chatterings, of course,
Spoil the one scene which, somehow, _did_ have charms;
You wept a bit, and I grew sad for you
Right here! Where Mr. X defends divorce
And What's-Her-Name falls fainting in his arms."
* * * *
STILL CALM
"Ghosts are such dumb things," said Alec, "they're slow-witted. I can
always outguess a ghost."
"How?" asked Tom.
"Well, it depends where. Take a bedroom, for example. If you use _any_
discretion a ghost can never get you in a bedroom."
"Go on, s'pose you think there's maybe a ghost in your bedroom--what
measures do you take on getting home at night?" demanded Amory,
interested.
"Take a stick" answered Alec, with ponderous reverence, "one about the
length of a broom-handle. Now, the first thing to do is to get the room
_cleared_--to do this you rush with your eyes closed into your study and
turn on the lights--next, approaching the closet, carefully run the stick
in the door three or four times. Then, if nothing happens, you can look
in. _Always, always_ run the stick in viciously first--_never_ look
first!"
"Of course, that's the ancient Celtic school," said Tom gravely.
"Yes--but they usually pray first. Anyway, you use this method to clear
the closets and also for behind all doors--"
"And the bed," Amory suggested.
"Oh, Amory, no!" cried Alec in horror. "That isn't the way--the bed
requires different tactics--let the bed alone, as you value your reason--
if there is a ghost in the room and that's only about a third of the time,
it is _almost always_ under the bed."
"Well" Amory began.
Alec waved him into silence.
"Of _course_ you never look. You stand in the middle of the floor and
before he knows what you're going to do make a sudden leap for the bed--
never walk near the bed; to a ghost your ankle is your most vulnerable
part--once in bed, you're safe; he may lie around under the bed all night,
but you're safe as daylight. If you still have doubts pull the blanket
over your head."
"All that's very interesting, Tom."
"Isn't it?" Alec beamed proudly. "All my own, too--the Sir Oliver Lodge
of the new world."
Amory was enjoying college immensely again. The sense of going forward
in a direct, determined line had come back; youth was stirring and
shaking out a few new feathers. He had even stored enough surplus energy
to sally into a new pose.
"What's the idea of all this 'distracted' stuff, Amory?" asked Alec one
day, and then as Amory pretended to be cramped over his book in a daze:
"Oh, don't try to act Burne, the mystic, to me."
Amory looked up innocently.
"What?"
"What?" mimicked Alec. "Are you trying to read yourself into a rhapsody
with--let's see the book."
He snatched it; regarded it derisively.
"Well?" said Amory a little stiffly.
"'The Life of St. Teresa,'" read Alec aloud. "Oh, my gosh!"
"Say, Alec."
"What?"
"Does it bother you?"
"Does what bother me?"
"My acting dazed and all that?"
"Why, no--of course it doesn't _bother_ me."
"Well, then, don't spoil it. If I enjoy going around telling people
guilelessly that I think I'm a genius, let me do it."
"You're getting a reputation for being eccentric," said Alec, laughing,
"if that's what you mean."
Amory finally prevailed, and Alec agreed to accept his face value in the
presence of others if he was allowed rest periods when they were alone;
so Amory "ran it out" at a great rate, bringing the most eccentric
characters to dinner, wild-eyed grad students, preceptors with strange
theories of God and government, to the cynical amazement of the
supercilious Cottage Club.
As February became slashed by sun and moved cheerfully into March,
Amory went several times to spend week-ends with Monsignor; once he
took Burne, with great success, for he took equal pride and delight in
displaying them to each other. Monsignor took him several times to see
Thornton Hancock, and once or twice to the house of a Mrs. Lawrence,
a type of Rome-haunting American whom Amory liked immediately.
Then one day came a letter from Monsignor, which appended an interesting
P. S.:
"Do you know," it ran, "that your third cousin, Clara Page,
widowed six months and very poor, is living in Philadelphia?
I don't think you've ever met her, but I wish, as a favor to me,
you'd go to see her. To my mind, she's rather a remarkable woman,
and just about your age."
Amory sighed and decided to go, as a favor. . . .
* * * *
CLARA
She was immemorial. . . . Amory wasn't good enough for Clara, Clara of
ripply golden hair, but then no man was. Her goodness was above the
prosy morals of the husband-seeker, apart from the dull literature of
female virtue.
Sorrow lay lightly around her, and when Amory found her in Philadelphia
he thought her steely blue eyes held only happiness; a latent strength,
a realism, was brought to its fullest development by the facts that she
was compelled to face. She was alone in the world, with two small
children, little money, and, worst of all, a host of friends. He saw her
that winter in Philadelphia entertaining a houseful of men for an evening,
when he knew she had not a servant in the house except the little colored
girl guarding the babies overhead. He saw one of the greatest libertines
in that city, a man who was habitually drunk and notorious at home and
abroad, sitting opposite her for an evening, discussing _girls' boarding-
schools_ with a sort of innocent excitement. What a twist Clara had to
her mind! She could make fascinating and almost brilliant conversation
out of the thinnest air that ever floated through a drawing-room.
The idea that the girl was poverty-stricken had appealed to Amory's sense
of situation. He arrived in Philadelphia expecting to be told that 921
Ark Street was in a miserable lane of hovels. He was even disappointed
when it proved to be nothing of the sort. It was an old house that had
been in her husband's family for years. An elderly aunt, who objected to
having it sold, had put ten years' taxes with a lawyer and pranced off to
Honolulu, leaving Clara to struggle with the heating-problem as best she
could. So no wild-haired woman with a hungry baby at her breast and a
sad Amelia-like look greeted him. Instead, Amory would have thought from
his reception that she had not a care in the world.
A calm virility and a dreamy humor, marked contrasts to her level-
headedness--into these moods she slipped sometimes as a refuge. She could
do the most prosy things (though she was wise enough never to stultify
herself with such "household arts" as _knitting_ and _embroidery_),
yet immediately afterward pick up a book and let her imagination rove as
a formless cloud with the wind. Deepest of all in her personality was
the golden radiance that she diffused around her. As an open fire in a
dark room throws romance and pathos into the quiet faces at its edge,
so she cast her lights and shadows around the rooms that held her,
until she made of her prosy old uncle a man of quaint and meditative
charm, metamorphosed the stray telegraph boy into a Puck-like creature of
delightful originality. At first this quality of hers somehow irritated
Amory. He considered his own uniqueness sufficient, and it rather
embarrassed him when she tried to read new interests into him for the
benefit of what other adorers were present. He felt as if a polite
but insistent stage-manager were attempting to make him give a new
interpretation of a part he had conned for years.
But Clara talking, Clara telling a slender tale of a hatpin and an
inebriated man and herself. . . . People tried afterward to repeat
her anecdotes but for the life of them they could make them sound like
nothing whatever. They gave her a sort of innocent attention and the
best smiles many of them had smiled for long; there were few tears in
Clara, but people smiled misty-eyed at her.
Very occasionally Amory stayed for little half-hours after the rest of
the court had gone, and they would have bread and jam and tea late in the
afternoon or "maple-sugar lunches," as she called them, at night.
"You _are_ remarkable, aren't you!" Amory was becoming trite from where
he perched in the centre of the dining-room table one six o'clock.
"Not a bit," she answered. She was searching out napkins in the
sideboard. "I'm really most humdrum and commonplace. One of those
people who have no interest in anything but their children."
"Tell that to somebody else," scoffed Amory. "You know you're perfectly
effulgent." He asked her the one thing that he knew might embarrass her.
It was the remark that the first bore made to Adam.
"Tell me about yourself." And she gave the answer that Adam must have
given.
"There's nothing to tell."
But eventually Adam probably told the bore all the things he thought
about at night when the locusts sang in the sandy grass, and he must have
remarked patronizingly how _different_ he was from Eve, forgetting how
different she was from him . . . at any rate, Clara told Amory much
about herself that evening. She had had a harried life from sixteen on,
and her education had stopped sharply with her leisure. Browsing in her
library, Amory found a tattered gray book out of which fell a yellow
sheet that he impudently opened. It was a poem that she had written at
school about a gray convent wall on a gray day, and a girl with her cloak
blown by the wind sitting atop of it and thinking about the many-colored
world. As a rule such sentiment bored him, but this was done with so
much simplicity and atmosphere, that it brought a picture of Clara to his
mind, of Clara on such a cool, gray day with her keen blue eyes staring
out, trying to see her tragedies come marching over the gardens outside.
He envied that poem. How he would have loved to have come along and seen
her on the wall and talked nonsense or romance to her, perched above him
in the air. He began to be frightfully jealous of everything about Clara:
of her past, of her babies, of the men and women who flocked to drink
deep of her cool kindness and rest their tired minds as at an absorbing
play.
"_Nobody_ seems to bore you," he objected.
"About half the world do," she admitted, "but I think that's a pretty
good average, don't you?" and she turned to find something in Browning
that bore on the subject. She was the only person he ever met who
could look up passages and quotations to show him in the middle of the
conversation, and yet not be irritating to distraction. She did it
constantly, with such a serious enthusiasm that he grew fond of watching
her golden hair bent over a book, brow wrinkled ever so little at hunting
her sentence.
Through early March he took to going to Philadelphia for week-ends.
Almost always there was some one else there and she seemed not anxious to
see him alone, for many occasions presented themselves when a word from
her would have given him another delicious half-hour of adoration.
But he fell gradually in love and began to speculate wildly on marriage.
Though this design flowed through his brain even to his lips, still he
knew afterward that the desire had not been deeply rooted. Once he
dreamt that it had come true and woke up in a cold panic, for in his
dream she had been a silly, flaxen Clara, with the gold gone out of
her hair and platitudes falling insipidly from her changeling tongue.
But she was the first fine woman he ever knew and one of the few good
people who ever interested him. She made her goodness such an asset.
Amory had decided that most good people either dragged theirs after them
as a liability, or else distorted it to artificial geniality, and of
course there were the ever-present prig and Pharisee--(but Amory never
included _them_ as being among the saved).
* * * *
ST. CECILIA
"Over her gray and velvet dress,
Under her molten, beaten hair,
Color of rose in mock distress
Flushes and fades and makes her fair;
Fills the air from her to him
With light and languor and little sighs,
Just so subtly he scarcely knows . . .
Laughing lightning, color of rose."
"Do you like me?"
"Of course I do," said Clara seriously.
"Why?"
"Well, we have some qualities in common. Things that are spontaneous in
each of us--or were originally."
"You're implying that I haven't used myself very well?"
Clara hesitated.
"Well, I can't judge. A man, of course, has to go through a lot more,
and I've been sheltered."
"Oh, don't stall, please, Clara," Amory interrupted; "but do talk about
me a little, won't you?"
"Surely, I'd adore to." She didn't smile.
"That's sweet of you. First answer some questions. Am I painfully
conceited?"
"Well--no, you have tremendous vanity, but it'll amuse the people who
notice its preponderance."
"I see."
"You're really humble at heart. You sink to the third hell of depression
when you think you've been slighted. In fact, you haven't much
self-respect."
"Centre of target twice, Clara. How do you do it? You never let me say
a word."
"Of course not--I can never judge a man while he's talking. But I'm not
through; the reason you have so little real self-confidence, even though
you gravely announce to the occasional philistine that you think you're
a genius, is that you've attributed all sorts of atrocious faults to
yourself and are trying to live up to them. For instance, you're always
saying that you are a slave to high-balls."
"But I am, potentially."
"And you say you're a weak character, that you've no will."
"Not a bit of will--I'm a slave to my emotions, to my likes, to my hatred
of boredom, to most of my desires--"
"You are not!" She brought one little fist down onto the other. "You're
a slave, a bound helpless slave to one thing in the world, your
imagination."
"You certainly interest me. If this isn't boring you, go on."
"I notice that when you want to stay over an extra day from college you
go about it in a sure way. You never decide at first while the merits of
going or staying are fairly clear in your mind. You let your imagination
shinny on the side of your desires for a few hours, and then you decide.
Naturally your imagination, after a little freedom, thinks up a million
reasons why you should stay, so your decision when it comes isn't true.
It's biassed."
"Yes," objected Amory, "but isn't it lack of will-power to let my
imagination shinny on the wrong side?"
"My dear boy, there's your big mistake. This has nothing to do with
will-power; that's a crazy, useless word, anyway; you lack judgment--
the judgment to decide at once when you know your imagination will play
you false, given half a chance."
"Well, I'll be darned!" exclaimed Amory in surprise, "that's the last
thing I expected."
Clara didn't gloat. She changed the subject immediately. But she had
started him thinking and he believed she was partly right. He felt like
a factory-owner who after accusing a clerk of dishonesty finds that his
own son, in the office, is changing the books once a week. His poor,
mistreated will that he had been holding up to the scorn of himself and
his friends, stood before him innocent, and his judgment walked off to
prison with the unconfinable imp, imagination, dancing in mocking glee
beside him. Clara's was the only advice he ever asked without dictating
the answer himself--except, perhaps, in his talks with Monsignor Darcy.
How he loved to do any sort of thing with Clara! Shopping with her was a
rare, epicurean dream. In every store where she had ever traded she was
whispered about as the beautiful Mrs. Page.
"I'll bet she won't stay single long."
"Well, don't scream it out. She ain't lookin' for no advice."
"_Ain't_ she beautiful!"
(Enter a floor-walker--silence till he moves forward,
smirking.)
"Society person, ain't she?"
"Yeah, but poor now, I guess; so they say."
"Gee! girls, _ain't_ she some kid!"
And Clara beamed on all alike. Amory believed that tradespeople gave her
discounts, sometimes to her knowledge and sometimes without it. He knew
she dressed very well, had always the best of everything in the house,
and was inevitably waited upon by the head floor-walker at the very least.
Sometimes they would go to church together on Sunday and he would walk
beside her and revel in her cheeks moist from the soft water in the new
air. She was very devout, always had been, and God knows what heights
she attained and what strength she drew down to herself when she knelt
and bent her golden hair into the stained-glass light.
"St. Cecelia," he cried aloud one day, quite involuntarily, and the
people turned and peered, and the priest paused in his sermon and Clara
and Amory turned to fiery red.
That was the last Sunday they had, for he spoiled it all that night.
He couldn't help it.
They were walking through the March twilight where it was as warm as June,
and the joy of youth filled his soul so that he felt he must speak.
"I think," he said and his voice trembled, "that if I lost faith in you
I'd lose faith in God."
She looked at him with such a startled face that he asked her the matter.
"Nothing," she said slowly, "only this: five men have said that to me
before, and it frightens me."
"Oh, Clara, is that your fate!"
She did not answer.
"I suppose love to you is--" he began.
She turned like a flash.
"I have never been in love."
They walked along, and he realized slowly how much she had told him . . .
never in love. . . . She seemed suddenly a daughter of light alone.
His entity dropped out of her plane and he longed only to touch her dress
with almost the realization that Joseph must have had of Mary's eternal
significance. But quite mechanically he heard himself saying:
"And I love you--any latent greatness that I've got is . . . oh, I can't
talk, but Clara, if I come back in two years in a position to marry you--"
She shook her head.
"No," she said; "I'd never marry again. I've got my two children and I
want myself for them. I like you--I like all clever men, you more than
any--but you know me well enough to know that I'd never marry a clever
man--" She broke off suddenly.
"Amory."
"What?"
"You're not in love with me. You never wanted to marry me, did you?"
"It was the twilight," he said wonderingly. "I didn't feel as though I
were speaking aloud. But I love you--or adore you--or worship you--"
"There you go--running through your catalogue of emotions in five
seconds."
He smiled unwillingly.
"Don't make me out such a light-weight, Clara; you _are_ depressing
sometimes."
"You're not a light-weight, of all things," she said intently, taking
his arm and opening wide her eyes--he could see their kindliness in the
fading dusk. "A light-weight is an eternal nay."
"There's so much spring in the air--there's so much lazy sweetness in
your heart."
She dropped his arm.
"You're all fine now, and I feel glorious. Give me a cigarette. You've
never seen me smoke, have you? Well, I do, about once a month."
And then that wonderful girl and Amory raced to the corner like two mad
children gone wild with pale-blue twilight.
"I'm going to the country for to-morrow," she announced, as she stood
panting, safe beyond the flare of the corner lamp-post. "These days are
too magnificent to miss, though perhaps I feel them more in the city."
"Oh, Clara!" Amory said; "what a devil you could have been if the Lord
had just bent your soul a little the other way!"
"Maybe," she answered; "but I think not. I'm never really wild and never
have been. That little outburst was pure spring."
"And you are, too," said he.
They were walking along now.
"No--you're wrong again, how can a person of your own self-reputed brains
be so constantly wrong about me? I'm the opposite of everything spring
ever stood for. It's unfortunate, if I happen to look like what pleased
some soppy old Greek sculptor, but I assure you that if it weren't for my
face I'd be a quiet nun in the convent without"--then she broke into a
run and her raised voice floated back to him as he followed--"my precious
babies, which I must go back and see."
She was the only girl he ever knew with whom he could understand how
another man might be preferred. Often Amory met wives whom he had known
as debutantes, and looking intently at them imagined that he found
something in their faces which said:
"Oh, if I could only have gotten _you!_" Oh, the enormous conceit of the
man!
But that night seemed a night of stars and singing and Clara's bright
soul still gleamed on the ways they had trod.
"Golden, golden is the air--" he chanted to the little pools of water.
. . . "Golden is the air, golden notes from golden mandolins, golden
frets of golden violins, fair, oh, wearily fair. . . . Skeins from
braided basket, mortals may not hold; oh, what young extravagant God,
who would know or ask it? . . . who could give such gold. . ."
* * * *
AMORY IS RESENTFUL
Slowly and inevitably, yet with a sudden surge at the last, while Amory
talked and dreamed, war rolled swiftly up the beach and washed the sands
where Princeton played. Every night the gymnasium echoed as platoon
after platoon swept over the floor and shuffled out the basket-ball
markings. When Amory went to Washington the next week-end he caught some
of the spirit of crisis which changed to repulsion in the Pullman car
coming back, for the berths across from him were occupied by stinking
aliens--Greeks, he guessed, or Russians. He thought how much easier
patriotism had been to a homogeneous race, how much easier it would have
been to fight as the Colonies fought, or as the Confederacy fought.
And he did no sleeping that night, but listened to the aliens guffaw and
snore while they filled the car with the heavy scent of latest America.
In Princeton every one bantered in public and told themselves privately
that their deaths at least would be heroic. The literary students read
Rupert Brooke passionately; the lounge-lizards worried over whether the
government would permit the English-cut uniform for officers; a few of
the hopelessly lazy wrote to the obscure branches of the War Department,
seeking an easy commission and a soft berth.
Then, after a week, Amory saw Burne and knew at once that argument would
be futile--Burne had come out as a pacifist. The socialist magazines,
a great smattering of Tolstoi, and his own intense longing for a cause
that would bring out whatever strength lay in him, had finally decided
him to preach peace as a subjective ideal.
"When the German army entered Belgium," he began, "if the inhabitants
had gone peaceably about their business, the German army would have been
disorganized in--"
"I know," Amory interrupted, "I've heard it all. But I'm not going to
talk propaganda with you. There's a chance that you're right--but even
so we're hundreds of years before the time when non-resistance can touch
us as a reality."
"But, Amory, listen--"
"Burne, we'd just argue--"
"Very well."
"Just one thing--I don't ask you to think of your family or friends,
because I know they don't count a picayune with you beside your sense of
duty--but, Burne, how do you know that the magazines you read and the
societies you join and these idealists you meet aren't just plain
_German?_"
"Some of them are, of course."
"How do you know they aren't _all_ pro-German--just a lot of weak ones--
with German-Jewish names."
"That's the chance, of course," he said slowly. "How much or how little
I'm taking this stand because of propaganda I've heard, I don't know;
naturally I think that it's my most innermost conviction--it seems a path
spread before me just now."
Amory's heart sank.
"But think of the cheapness of it--no one's really going to martyr you
for being a pacifist--it's just going to throw you in with the worst--"
"I doubt it," he interrupted.
"Well, it all smells of Bohemian New York to me."
"I know what you mean, and that's why I'm not sure I'll agitate."
"You're one man, Burne--going to talk to people who won't listen--with
all God's given you."
"That's what Stephen must have thought many years ago. But he preached
his sermon and they killed him. He probably thought as he was dying what
a waste it all was. But you see, I've always felt that Stephen's death
was the thing that occurred to Paul on the road to Damascus, and sent him
to preach the word of Christ all over the world."
"Go on."
"That's all--this is my particular duty. Even if right now I'm just a
pawn--just sacrificed. God! Amory--you don't think I like the Germans!"
"Well, I can't say anything else--I get to the end of all the logic about
non-resistance, and there, like an excluded middle, stands the huge
spectre of man as he is and always will be. And this spectre stands
right beside the one logical necessity of Tolstoi's, and the other
logical necessity of Nietzsche's--" Amory broke off suddenly. "When
are you going?"
"I'm going next week."
"I'll see you, of course."
As he walked away it seemed to Amory that the look in his face bore a
great resemblance to that in Kerry's when he had said good-by under Blair
Arch two years before. Amory wondered unhappily why he could never go
into anything with the primal honesty of those two.
"Burne's a fanatic," he said to Tom, "and he's dead wrong and, I'm
inclined to think, just an unconscious pawn in the hands of anarchistic
publishers and German-paid rag wavers--but he haunts me--just leaving
everything worth while--"
Burne left in a quietly dramatic manner a week later. He sold all his
possessions and came down to the room to say good-by, with a battered old
bicycle, on which he intended to ride to his home in Pennsylvania.
"Peter the Hermit bidding farewell to Cardinal Richelieu," suggested Alec,
who was lounging in the window-seat as Burne and Amory shook hands.
But Amory was not in a mood for that, and as he saw Burne's long legs
propel his ridiculous bicycle out of sight beyond Alexander Hall, he knew
he was going to have a bad week. Not that he doubted the war--Germany
stood for everything repugnant to him; for materialism and the direction
of tremendous licentious force; it was just that Burne's face stayed in
his memory and he was sick of the hysteria he was beginning to hear.
"What on earth is the use of suddenly running down Goethe," he declared
to Alec and Tom. "Why write books to prove he started the war--or that
that stupid, overestimated Schiller is a demon in disguise?"
"Have you ever read anything of theirs?" asked Tom shrewdly.
"No," Amory admitted.
"Neither have I," he said laughing.
"People will shout," said Alec quietly, "but Goethe's on his same old
shelf in the library--to bore any one that wants to read him!"
Amory subsided, and the subject dropped.
"What are you going to do, Amory?"
"Infantry or aviation, I can't make up my mind--I hate mechanics, but
then of course aviation's the thing for me--"
"I feel as Amory does," said Tom. "Infantry or aviation--aviation sounds
Back to Full Books
|