Cornell University Library The original of this bool< is in the Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924096224682 3 1924 096 224 682 In compliance with current copyright law, Cornell University Library produced this replacement volume on paper that meets the ANSI Standard Z39.48-1992 to replace the irreparably deteriorated original. 2003 CORNELL UNIVERSITY LIBRARY In Memory of Jason Seley THIS SIDE OF PARADISE 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. _^^^^^ ^.^^_ NEW YORK CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 1920 COPTBIOHT, 1920, BT CHARLES SCRIBNER'8 SONS Published April, 1920 "Reprinted twice in April, 1920 TO SIGORNEY FAY CONTENTS BOOK ONE: THE ROMANTIC EGOTIST CHAPTER PAGE I. Amory, Son of Beatrice 3 II. Spires and Gargoyles 41 III. The Egotist Considers 99 IV. Narcissus Off Duty 131 [Interlude: May, 1917 — February, 1919.] BOOK TWO: THE EDUCATION OF A PERSONAGE CHAPTEtt PACK I. The Debutante 179 II. Experiments in Convalescence 212 III. Young Irony 238 IV. The Supercilious Sacrifice 261 V. The Egotist Becomes a Personage .... 273 BOOK ONE THE ROMANTIC EGOTIST CHAPTER I 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 pos- terity 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 hov- ered in the background of his family's life, an unasser- tive 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 Amer- 3 4 THIS SIDE OF PARADISE ican girl to Cardinal Vitori and Queen Margaritta and more subtle celebrities that one must have had some culture even to have heard of. She learned in England to prefer whiskey and soda to wine, and her small talk was broadened in two senses during a winter in Vienna. All in all Beatrice O'Hara absorbed the sort of educa- tion 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 grfeat gardener clipped the in- ferior roses to produce one perfect bud. In her less important moments she returned to Amer- ica, 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 acqui- escent bell-boys in the Waldorf, outgrowing a natural AMORY, SON OF BEATRICE 5 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." "AU right." "I am feeling very old to-day, Amory," she would sigh, her face a rare cameo of pathos, her voice exquis- itely 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 sun- shine." 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." "1 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 "FStes 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 exalta- tion, 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 genera- tion would have been termed her "line." 6 THIS SIDE OF PARADISE "This son of mine," he heard her tell a room full of awe-stxuck, admiring women one day, " is entirely sophis- ticated 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 raconteur, but many were the keys turned in sideboard locks that night against the possible defection of little Bobby or Bar- bara. . . , 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 rela- tives to serve in place of friends, and an enviable stand- ing 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, the}^ 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-West- erners. "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 ac- AMORY, SON OF BEATRICE 7 cents 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 Ul, and therefore im- portant 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 waver- ing 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 sJxapatico" — 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 Ashville, for whose passionate kisses and imsentimental conversations she had taken a decided penchant — they had discussed the matter pro and con with an intellec- tual romancing quite devoid of soppiness. Eventually she had decided to marry for background, and the young pagan from Ashville had gone through a spiritual crisis, joined the Catholic Church, and was now — Mon- signor Darcy. 8 THIS SIDE OF PARADISE "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 under- stand 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 passen- gers 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. "/ am going to have a bobbing party," it said, "on Thursday,'' December the seventeenth, at five o'clock, and I wotild 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 AMORY, SON OF BEATRICE 9 guys at school" how particularly superior he felt him- self 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 contemp- tuously, 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 irmuendoes at each other all the following week: "Aw — I b'lieve, doncherknow, the Umuricun revolu- tion 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 blun- dering 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, per- sistent efforts to excel in the winter sports, and with hia ankles aching and bending in spite of his efforts, he skated valiantly around the Lorelie rink every after- noon, 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 lo THIS SIDE OF PARADISE preliminary draft in the back of Collar and Daniel's "First- Year Latin," composed an answer: My dear Miss St. Claire: Your trtdy charming envitation for the evening of next Thursday evening was truly delightful to recieve this morning. I will he charm and inchanted indeed to present my compliments on next Thursday evening. _ .,,. „ Fatthfully, ^^^^y ^^^^^ 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 late- ness 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, Vm. 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 un- AMORY, SON OF BEATRICE ir aware that his failure to be cockney was ruining his standing. Amory considered him coldly. "But," continued the butler, his voice rising unnec-1 essarily, "she's the only one what is here. The party's I gone." Anfiory 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 bjr 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 diffi- culty. "'Lo, Amory." "'Lo, Myra." He had described the state of his vitality. "Well — you got here, awyways." "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." "Wasany onefe7/e- preciated the Japanese invasion. "When do I go to school?" AMORY, SON OF BEATRICE 25 "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, prosper- ous and well-dressed; Taft and Hotchkiss, which pre- pared 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, conven- tional, impressive type, year after year; their mental stimulus the college entrance exams; their vague pur- pose set forth in a hundred circulars as "To impart a Thorough Mental, Moral, and Physical Training as a Christian Gentleman, to fit the hoy for meeting the prob- lems of his day and generation, and to give a solid foun- dation 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, 26 THIS SIDE OF PARADISE 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 overlooldng 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. Mon- signor 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 Epis- copalians. He was intensely ritualistic, startlingly dra- matic, loved the idea of God enough to be a celibate, and rather Hked 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 AMORY, SON OF BEATRICE 27 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 j^our 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," fin- ished 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 sus- 28 THIS SIDE OF PARADISE pected 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-ambassador 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 confiden- tially, 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 sug- gestion, 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 be- tween these two. Monsignor gave the effect of sun- light 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 AMORY, SON OF BEATRICE 29 M'ith Parnell and Gladstone and Bismarck — and after- ward 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 intel- lect was concentrated on matters of popularity, the in- tricacies 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 con- firmed, and his joy of life crystallized to a thousand am- bitions. 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 soimding for Amory's prelimi- nary 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 em sorry " "No, you're not. No one person in the world is necessary to you or to me." "Well " "G©od-by." The Egotist Down Amary's two years at St. Regis', though in turn pain- ful 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-con- sciousness of a governing class; we have, instead, clean, flaccid and innocuous preparatory schools. 30 THIS SIDE OF PARADISE He went all wrong at the start, was generally consid- ered both conceited and arrogant, and universally de- tested. 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. Witli 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 un- happy. 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 comfort- able glow when "Wooke^-wookey," the deaf old house- keeper, 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. AMORY, SON OF BEATRICE 31 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 — Slightest man on the squad. You ought to go away to school, Froggy. It's great stuff." iNqiDENT or 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 courte- ous, because this Mr. Margotson had been kindly dis- posed 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 per- sonal 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 con- form to what others expect of him." He a-hemmed 32 THIS SIDE OF PARADISE again with delicate reticence, and continued: "They seem to think that you're — ah — rather too fresk " Amory could stand no more. He rose from his chair, scarcely controlling his voice when he spoke. "I know — oh, donH 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 ta 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 bril- liance 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 elec- tric 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 wallced 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 AMORY, SON OF BEATRICE S3 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 — " sai^ tbe tenor, and Amory agreed silently, but passion- ately. "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 melod}' 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 habitu6 of roof- gardens, to meet a girl who should look like that — bet- ter, 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 uncertaia fif- teen-year-old voice broke in in a melancholy strain on Amory's musings: "I'd marry that girl to-night." 34 THIS SIDE OF PARADISE 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 ofif like m)nriad Kghts, 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 caf6, 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 Gro- ton was played from three of a snappy, exhilarating afternoon far into the crisp autumnal twilight, and Amory at quarter-back, exhorting in wild despair, mak- ing 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 |-jrow of a Norse galley, one with Roland and Hora- AMORY, SON OF BEATRICE 35 tius, 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-arm- ing .. . 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 scofi&ng superiority of sixth-form year and success Amory looked back with cynical wonder on his status of the year before. He was changed as com- pletely 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 ferret- ing 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 fun- damental 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 o 6 THIS SIDE OF PARADISE his window. Many nights he lay there dreaming avi^ake 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 moonKght 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 da-woi 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 swing- ing into the wide air, into a fairy-land 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 Tenny- son 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 marjy a talk, on the highroad or lying bell\--down AMORY, SON OF BEATRICE 37 along the edge of the baseball diamond, or late at Bight 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. RahiU'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 smnmer at Harstrum's, get into Sheff w^ith 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 Port- land. 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 phil- osophers." "I'm not." "Sure you are. You've got a darn good head on you." But Amory knew that nothing in the abstract, no tlieory or generality, ever moved Rahill untM he stubbed his toe upon the concrete minutiae of it. o 8 THIS SIDE OF PARADISE "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 en- tertain tiieir kid sisters; keep my temper when they get selfish and then they thiii 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 — v/hy, I suppose that the sign of it is when a fellow slicks his hair back with water." "LikeCarstairs?" "Yes — sure. He's a slicker." They spent two evenings getting an exact definition. The slicker was good-looking or c/ea«-looking; he had brains, social brains, that is, and he used all means on the broad path of honesty to get ahead, be popular, ad- mired, and never in trouble. He dressed well, was par- ticularly 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 specta- cles as badges of their slickerhood, and this made them so easy to recognize that Amory and Rahill never missed AMORY, SON OF BEATRICE 391 one. The slicker seemed distributed through school, al- ways a little wiser and shrewder than his contempo- raries, managing some team or other, and keeping his cleverness carefully concealed. Amory found the slicker a most valuable classification imtil 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 irreconcila- ble to the slicker proper. This was a first real break from the hypocrisy of school tradition. The slicker was a definite element of suc- cess, differing intrinsically from the prep school "big man." "The Sucker" "The Big Man" 1. Clever sense of social values, i. Inclined to stupidity and unconscious of social val- ues. 2. Dresses well. Pretends that 2. Thinks dress is superficial, dress is superficial — but and is inclined to be care- knows that it isn't. less about it. 3. Goes into such activities as 3. Goes out for everything he can shine in. from a sense of duty. 4. Gets to college and is, in a 4. Gets to college and has worldly way, successful. a problematical future. Feels lost without his cir- cle, 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 slicked. S- Hair not slicked. Amory had decided definitely on Princeton, even though he would be the only boy entering that year 40 THIS SIDE OF PARADISE 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 after- ward, 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 II 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, dilapi- dated 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 be 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. 41 42 THIS SIDE OF PARADISE ," 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 piUow-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 untU the following Monday. Those who were too obviously, too nervously at home were freshmen, for as each train brought a new contin- gent 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 after- noon Amory realized that now the newest arrivals were taking him for an upper classman, and he tried conscien- tiously to look both pleasantly blase and casually criti- cal, which was as near as he could analyze the preva- lent 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 scru- tinized his room resignedly, concluding that it was hope- less 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 appeaxed in the doorway. SPIRES AND GARGOYLES 43 "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 Holi- day 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 tJiere — or pay anjrways." "Crime!" 44 THIS SIDE OF PARADISE "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 woulda't have gone to Yale for a million." "Me either." "You going out for anything?" inquired Amary 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, "feut 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 ia front of him, as well as by the wild yelling and shoutiag. "Yoho!" "Oh, honey-6a5y — ^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 audi- ence took it up noisily. This was followed by an indis- tinguishable song that included much stamping and then by an endless, incoherent dirge. SPIRES AND GARGOYLES 45 "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 im- personal glances, Amory decided that he liked the mov- ies, 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 at- titude 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." "Yen 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. 46 THIS SIDE OF PARADISE Now, far down the shadowy line of University Place a white-clad phalanx broke the gloom, and marching fig- ures, white-shirted, white-trousered, swung rhythmically up the street, with linked arms and heads thrown back : "Going back — going hack, Going — back — io— Nassau — Hall, Going back — going back — To the— Best— Old— Place— of— All. Going back — going back, From all — this — earth-ly — ball, We 'II — clear — the — track — as — we — go — hack — Going — hack — to — Nassau — Hall I" Amory closed his eyes as the ghostly procession drew near. The song soared so high that all droj^ed 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 col- lege 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 pasan 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 cliil- SPIRES AND GARGOYLES 47 dren, 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 con- ' sciousness — 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 g5ntmiasium and elected some one from Hill School class president, a Lawrence- ville 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 wor- ship, 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 re- served 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 puz- zled high-school element. From the moment he realized this Amory resented social barriers as artificial distinc- tions made by the strong to bolster up their weak retain- ers and keep out the almost strong. Having decided to be one of the gods of the class, he i 48 THIS SIDE OF PARADISE reported for freshman football practice, but in the sec- ond week, playing quarter-back, already paragraphed in corners of the Princelonian, he wrenched his knee seri- ously enough to put him out for the rest of the season. This forced him to retire and consider the situation. "i2 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 Holi- day 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 Princctonian , competing furiously against forty others for the co\'eted 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 SPIRES AND GARGOYLES 49 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, j^et 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-cla~s clubs, concerning which he had pumped a reluctant graduate during the previous summer, excited his curi- osity: Ivy, detached and breathlessly aristocratic; Cot- tage, an impressive melange 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-alcohoiic, faintly religious and politically powerful; fiambuoyant Col- onial; literary Quadrangle; and the dozen others, vary- ing in age and position. Anything which brought an under classman iato too glaring a light was labelled with the damning brand of "running it out." The movies thrived on caustic com- ments, but the men who made them were generally run- ning it out; talldng of clubs was running it out; standing for anything very strongly, as, for instance, drinking parties or tetotalling, was ruiming it out; in short, being personally conspicuous was not tolerated, and the influ- ential 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 Princetoiiian 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 50 THIS SIDE OF PARASIDE 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 immedi- ately among the 61ite of the class. Many afternoons they, lounged in the windows of 12 Univee and watched the class pass to and from Com- mons, noting satellites already attaching themselves to the more prominent, watching the lonely grind with his hurried step and downcast eye, envying the happy se- curity 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, consunaing a family of Fatimas with contem- plative 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 bour- geois." Amory lay for a moment without speaking. "I won't be— long," he said finally. "But I hate to get an3rwhere 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 knockout, but this Langueduc — he's the SPIRES AND GARGOYLES 51 rugged type, isn't he? I distrust that sort. All dia- monds look big in the rough." "Well," said Kerry, as the excitement subsided, "you're a literary genius. It's up to you." "I wonder" — Aniory paused — "if I could be. I hon- estly 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 Litt." Amoty reached lazily at a pile of magazines oa 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 freshmaa, 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 — com^ 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 Cumizza, 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 52 THIS SIDE OF PARADISE to tlujik 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 Burae's coat- tails." "I can't drift — I want to be interested. I want to pull strings, even for somebody else, or be Princetoniaa 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 daran 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 relin- quished himself to watching Kerry extract joy from 12 Univee. They filled the Jewish youth's bed with lemon pie; SPIRES AND GARGOITES 5^ they put out the gas all over the house every night by blowing into the jet in Amory's room, to the bewilder- ment 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 jack- pot from dinner to dawn, and on the occasion of one man's birthday persuaded him to buy sufficient cham- pagne for a hilarious celebration. The donor of the party having remained sober, Kerry and Amory acci- dently 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. "AU from the Twin Cities." He named them ofif. "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 lei me, just as if it wasn't part of them. As soon as I get hold 54 THIS SIDE OF PARADISE 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 scis- sors, 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 fresh- man mid-years passed, and life in 12 Univee con- tinued 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 hved 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 experin nt- ing vath mining stocks and, in consequence, his allow- ance, 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, find- ing 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 SPIRES AND GARGOYLES 55 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 choco- late 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 hav- ing 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 com- panion proved to be none other than "that awful high- S6 THIS SIDE OF PARADISE brow, Thomas Parke DTnvilliers," who signed the pas- sionate love-poems in the Litt. He was, perhaps, nine- teen, with stooped shoulders, pale blue eyes, and, as Amory could tell from his general appearance, without much conception of social competition and such phe- nomena 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 notic- ing, 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 Phi- listines and one part deadly grinds, and to find a person who could mention Keats without stammering, yet evi- dently 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 SPIRES AND GARGOYLES 57 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 DTnvUliers' undoubted attractions and value against the menace of cold eyes behind tortoise-rimmed spectacles that he fan- cied 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 Prince- ton through the satiated eyes of Oscar Wilde and Swin- burne — 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, Suder- mann, Robert Hugh Benson, the Savoy Operas — just a heterogeneous mixture, for he suddenly discovered that he had read nothing for years. Tom DTnvilliers became at £a*st an occasion rather than a friend. Amory saw him about once a week, and together they gilded the ceiling of Tom's room and deco- rated the walls with imitation tapestry, bought at an auction, tall candlesticks and figured curtains. Amory liked him for being clever and literary without effemi- nacy 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 encoiu-age 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 embar- 58 THIS SIDE OF PARADISE rassed, and after that made epigrams only before D'ln- villiers or a convenient mirror. One day Tom and Amory tried reciting their own and Lord Dunsany's poems to the music of Kerry's grapho- phone. " Chant ! " cried Tom. "Don't recite ! ChantI " Amory, who was performing, looked annoyed, and claimed that he needed a record with less piano in it. Kerry thereupon roUed 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 Kturgy 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 Uni- vee. This caused mild titters among the other fresh- men, 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 hun recite poetry by the hour, while he lay with closed eyes on Amory's sofa and lis- tened: "Asleep or waking is it? for her neck Kissed over dose, wears yet a purple speck Wherein the pained blood falters and goes out ; Soft and stung softly — fairer for a fleck ..." SPIRES AND GARGOYLES 59 "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 eflFective 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, clus- tered 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 some- where 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 insidi-, ously through the lazy April afternoons, seemed so in-' tangible 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. 6o THIS SIDE OF PAR.^DISE .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 occa- sional 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. SPIRES AND GARGOYLES 6x "I'm very damn wet!" he said aloud to tfce 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 princi- pals 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 I" The coach fumed helplessly, the Triangle Club presi- dent, 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. "AU 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 62 THIS SIDE OF PARADISE vacation. The play and music were the work of under- graduates, 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 sopho- more 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 pow- erful coflfee, 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 spot- light man rehearsing by throwing weird shafts into angry eyes; over aU 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 mysterj'', 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 com- edy," 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 ex- SPIRES AND GARGOYLES 63 pelled 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, dog-gone it ! " There was one brilliant place in "Ha-HaHortense!" 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-HaHortense!" 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 ChieJ, 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 extraordi- nary punch, and flaunted an astonishing array of femi- nine 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 64 THIS SIDE OF PARADISE 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 vaca- tion 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 Min- neapolis while her parents went abroad. He remem- bered Isabelle only as a Kttle 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." SPIRES AND GARGOYLES 65 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 mem- ory 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 mock- ery, yet with a furtive excitement that Amory consid- ered 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 66 THIS SIDE OF PARADISE 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 uncomfort- able for the one who hasn't a date with her. The "belle" was surrounded by a dozen men in the in- termissions between dances. Try to find the P. D. between dances, just Iry to find her. The same girl . . . deep in an atmosphere of jungle music and the questioning of moral codes. Amory fotmd 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. Descriptivk Amory was now eighteen years old, just under six feet tall and exceptionally, but not conventionally, SPIRES AND GARGOYLES 67 handsome. He had rather a young face, the ingenuous- ness of which was marred by the penetrating green eyes, fringed with long dark eyelashes. He lacked somehow that intense animal magnetism that so often accom- panies 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 sensa- tions 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 dis- cordant 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 nervous- ness 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 tantaUzingly, 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 consider- able part of her day — the first day of her arrival. Com- 68 THIS SIDE OF PARADISE ing up in the machine from the station, Sally had volun- teered, 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 coUege, and he's coming to-night. He's heard so much about you — says he remembers your eyes." This had pleased IsabeUe. 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 fol- lowed 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 moc- casins and winter-carnival costume? How very West- ern I Of course he wasn't that way: he went to Prince- ton, was a sophomore or something. Really she had no SPIRES AND GARGOYLES 69 distinct idea of him. An ancient snap-shot she had pre- served 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 pro- portions 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 emo- tions. . . . They drew up at a spreading, white-stone building, set back from the snowy street. Mrs. Weatherby greeted her warmly and her various 3'ounger 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 ac- quaintance with that morning were all rather impressed and as much by her direct personality as by her reputa- tion. 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 hne, and was properly inconstant. In fact, he summed up all the romance that her age and environ- ^o THIS SIDE OF PARADISE ment 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 edu- cation 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 sur- rounded 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 SPIRES AND GARGOYLES 71 things Isabelle could do socially with one idea were remarkable. First, she repeated it rapturously in an enthusiastic contralto with a soupfon 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 imconscious that this was being done, not for him, but for the green eyes that glistened under the shining carefully watered hair, a Httle to her left, for Isabelle had discovered Amory. As an actress even in the full- est 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 watch- ing. "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 whis- pered: "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, 72 THIS SIDE OF PARADISE 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 Frog- gy 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 enrap- tured curiosity. Amory shook his head. "I don't know you very well yet." "Will you tell me — afterward?" she half whispered. He nodded. SPIRES AND GARGOYLES 73 "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, pro- claimed 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 blase sophistication. She had lived in a larger city and had sh'ghtly an advantage in range. But she accepted his pose — it was one of the dozen little conven- tions 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 pro- 74 THIS SIDE OF PARADISE ceeded 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 pres- sure that said: "You know that-your dances are making my evening." But time passed, two nours 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 chat- tered 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 arti- ficial 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 SPIRES AND GARGOYLES 75 who thought she was a "pretty kid— worth keeping an eye on." But Isabella strung the names into a fabrica- tion of gayety that would have dazzled a Viennese noble- man. 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 — 76 THIS SIDE OF PARADISE 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 hus- kOy: "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 delib- erately on the floor. Their hands touched for an in- stant, 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 — /'// 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." SPIRES AND GARGOYLES 77 " 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, cosey 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 foot- steps 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 78 THIS SIDE OF PARADISE 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 cut- ting 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 aU. 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 sue- SPIRES AND GARGOYLES 79 cess, warmed to him as the club elections grew nigh, and he and Tom were visited by groups of upper class- men 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 flabber- gasted 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 an- nounced tearfully and wildly that they must join the same club, nothing should separate them; there were snarling disclosures of long-hidden grudges as the Sud- denly Prominent remembered snubs of freshman year. Unknown men were elevated into importance when they received certain coveted bids; others who were con- sidered "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 wear- ing 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 un- fathomable secret reasons known to no one but the wielders of the black balls. This orgy of sociability culminated in a gigantic So THIS SIDE OF PARADISE party at the Nassau Inn, where punch was dispensed from immense bowls, and the whole down-stairs became a de- lirious, circulating, shouting pattern of faces and voices. " Hi, Dibby— 'gratulations ! " "Gk)o' 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' de- light." "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 CambeU 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 cyni- cally. SPIRES AND GARGOYLES 8r "Sacred trust, but dcm't be a critical goopher or you can't go ! " "I think I'll sleep," Amory said cabnly, 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 boimd 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 per- sons unknown, who deserted it in Princeton and left for the West. Heartless Humbird here got permission from the city coimcil 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." 82 THIS SIDE OF PARADISE "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 ^ con- templation 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. SPIRES AND GARGOYLES 83, 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 ptean 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 chUd!" 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 aU the banali- ties 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 im- posing 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. 84 THIS SIDE OF PARADISE "Eight twenty-five." "Rotten overcharge. We'll give them two dollars and one for the waiter. Kerry, coUect 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 Gany- mede. "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 motion- less 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 mean- time " They left the car at Asbury and street-car'd to Allen- hurst, 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," ex- plained Kerry. "We don't believe in property and we're putting it to the great test." "Night vfill descend," Amory suggested. "Watch, and put your trust in Holiday." They became jovial about five-thirty and, linJiing 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 SPIRES AND GARGOYLES 85 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 pre- sent Messrs. Connage, Sloane, Humbird, Ferrenby, and Blaine." The girl bobbed courtesies all around. Poor creature j Amory supposed she had never before been noticed in her life — ^possibly she was half-witted. While she ac- companied 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 ta her on the other side, and she giggled and grinned. Amory was content to sit and watch the by-play, think- ing 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. Akc and Kerry were the life of it, but not quite the centre. Somehow the quiet Himibird, and Sloane, with his impatient super- ciliousness, 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 intan- S6 THIS SIDE OF PARADISE gibJy 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 righteous- ness. He could dissipate without going to pieces, and even his most bohemian adventures never seemed "run- ning it out." People dressed like him, tried to talk as he did. . . . Amory decided that he probably held the v.^orId 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 peo- ple 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 " cul- tivate" him. Servants worshipped him, and treated hrra like a god. He seemed the eternal example of what tlie 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. " WeU," 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 bad all waJked so rigidly. After supper they saw Kaluka to the boardwalk, and then strolled back along the beach to Asburv. The SPIRES AND GARGOYLES 87 evening sea was a new sensation, for all its color and mel- low 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 sup- pered 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, hav- ing collected a huge pile of rugs from the booths to serve as mattresses and blankets, they talked untU 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 38 THIS SIDE OF PARADISE 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 mul- titude 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 occa- sions, and it became the class joke when, on a query being levelled at him, he was nudged awake by Fer- renby 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 sprin;:,' was too rare to If-t anything interfere with SPIRES AND GARGOYLES 89 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 managersliip 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 intermit- tent 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 let- ters, 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 vrould. I'm ensraged." 90 THIS SIDE OF PARADISE "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 agaiu, 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 v/atch, 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 raptur- ous 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, 3'et 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 any one but you — but you see I tlwuglit you were fickle the first time I saw you and you are so popular and everything that I can't imagine your really liking me best. Oh, Isabelle, dear — it's a wonderful night. Somebody is play- ing "Love Moon" on a mandolin far across the campus, and the music seems to bring you into the window. Now he's play- ing "Good-by, Boys, I'm Through," and how well it suits roe. For I am through with everything. I have decided never to SPIRES AND GARGOYLES 91 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 blase, because it's not that. It's just that I'm in love. Oh, dearest IsabeUe (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'U 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 jovial- ity 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 sug- gested. "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 Lawrence- ville Road. "What are you going to do this summer, Amory?" 92 THIS SIDE OF PARADISE "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 Minneapo- lis, 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 ris- ing 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 man- ner. 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?" SPIRES AND GARGOYLES 93 "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 any- thing. 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; every thhig's good to-night. Oh, for a hot, languorous summer and Isabelle!" "Oh, you and your Isabelle! I'U 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 any- thing but mediocre poetry." They rode into Princeton as the sun was making col- ored 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 cho- ruses, and in the tents there was great reunion under the 94 THIS SIDE OF PARADISE 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 formitig in his mind. . . . So the gray car crept nightward in the dark and there was no life stirred as it went hy. . . . 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 nighibirds cried across the air. . . . A moment by an inn of lamps and shades, a, yellow inn wider 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." SPIRES AND GARGOYLES 95 " 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. 96 THIS SIDE OF PARADISE 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 re- minded 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 g)minasium at eleven, when the upper classmen were admitted to the freshman dance. She was aU 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. SPIRES AND GARGOYLES 97 The next day was another whirl. They lunched in a gay party of six in a private dining-room at the club, while IsabeUe 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 be- come 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 IsabeUe 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 sur- face 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 98 THIS SIDE OF PARADISE 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 Borg6s' 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 foUow his own will. There was little in his life now that he would have changed. . . . Ox- ford 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 -tairs, 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 III 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 look- ing 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 goo- pher. 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 dis- appear 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 J?a«ing the paper cheerfully. "HeUo, Jesse." "Hello there, Savonarola." "I just read your editorial." "Good boy — didn't know you stooped that low." "Jesse, you startled me." "How so?" 146 THIS SIDE OF PARADISE "Aren't you afraid the faculty'!! get after you if you pu!! tliis irreligious stuff?" "Wliat?" "Lilie tliis morning." "Wliat tlie devi! — tliat editorial was on tlie coacliing system." "Yes, but that quotation " Jesse sat up. "What quotation?" "You know: 'He wlio is not witli 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 Washing- ton, 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. Mat- thew 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 pene- trate 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 NARCISSUS OFF DUTY 147 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 ex- ample. 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 rever- 148 THIS SIDE OF PARADISE ence, "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, care- fully 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. "uh, Amory, no!" cried AJec 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 sa;'fe; he may lie around un- der 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, detennined line had come back; youth was stirring and shaking out a few new feathers. He had even stored enough surplus en- ergy to sally into a new pose. NARCISSUS OFF DUTY 149 "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 stiiHy. " '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 al- lowed 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, pre- ceptors with strange theories of God and government, to the cynical amazernent 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 ISO THIS SIDE OF PARADISE 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 lit- tle 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' hoarding-schools with a sort of innocent excite- NARCISSUS OFF DUTY 151 ment. 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 ap- pealed 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 disap- pointed when it proved to be nothing of the sort. It was an old house that had been in her husband's fam- ily 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 wUd- 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 con- trasts 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 Puckrlike creature of delightful originalitj'. At first this quality of hers somehow irritated Amory. He considered his own uniqueness suflicient, and it f52 THIS SIDE OF PARADISE 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 in- terpretation of a part he had conned for years. But Clara talking, Clara telling a slender tale of a hat- pin 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 rftany 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 be- coming 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 patroniz- ingly how different he was from Eve, forgetting how dif- NARCISSUS OFF DUTY 153 ferent 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 li- brary, 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 be- gan 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 irritat- ing 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 Philadel- phia for week-ends. Almost always there was some one 154 THIS SIDE OF PARADISE 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 de- cided that most good people either dragged theirs after them as a liability, or else distorted it to artificial genial- it}', and of course there were the ever-present prig and Pharisee — (but Amory never included them as being among the saved). St. Cecelia "Over her gray and velvet dress, Under her molten, beaten hair. Color of rose in mock distress Flushes and jades 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?" NARCISSUS OFF DUTY 155 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 an- nounce 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 wUl." "Not a bit of will — I'm a slave to my emotions, to my Hies, to my hatred of boredom, to most of my de- sires " "You are not!" She brought one Uttle 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, 156 THIS SIDE OF PARADISE "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 stay- ing are fairly clear in your mind. You let your imagina- tion 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 wiU-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 sujprise, "that's the last thing I expected." Clara didn't gloat; She changed the subject im- mediately. 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 ofl&ce, is changing the books once a week. His poor, mistreated will that he had been holding up to the scorn of himseK and his friends, stood before him innocent, and his judgment walked off to prison with the unconfinable imp, imagination, danc- ing in mocking glee beside him. Clara's was the only advice he ever asked without dictating the answer him- self — 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. NARCISSUS OFF DUTY 157 "I'll bet she won't stay single long." "Well, don't scream it out. She ain't lookin' for no advice." "-4m'/ she beautiful!" {Enter a floor-walker — silence till he moves for- ward, 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 Sun- day 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 invol- untarily, 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. 158 THIS SIDE OF PARADISE "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 Hght 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 mechanic- ally 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." NARCISSUS OFF DUTY 159 "You're not a light-weight, of all things," she said intently, takiag 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 twih'ght. "I'm going to the country for to-morrow," she an- nounced, 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 w^eren'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 i6o THIS SIDE OF PARADISE could understand how another man might be preferred. Often Amory met wives whom he had known as debu- tantes, and looking intently at them imagined that he found something in their faces which said: "Oh, if I could only have gotten youl" Oh, the enonnous 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 Jrets of golden violins, fair, oh, ■wearily fair. . . . Skeins from braided basket, mortals may not hold; ok, what young extravagant God, who wovld know or ask it? . . . who could give su^h 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 g3Tnnasium echoed as platoon after platoon swept over the floor and shuffled out the basket-ball markings. When Amory went to Wash- ington 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 oc- cupied 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 Con- federacy 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 NARCISSUS OFF DUTY i6i 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 Bume and knew at once that argument would be futile — ^Burne had come out as a pacifist. The socialist magazines, a great smat- tering 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 sub- jective ideal. "WTien the German army entered Belgium," he be- gan, "if the inhabitants had gone peaceably about their business, the German army would have been disor- ganized 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 nam.es." i62 THIS SIDE OF PARADISE "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, Bume — agoing 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 d3dng 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." "Goon." "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." NARCISSUS OFF DUTY i6 o 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 imconscious pawn in the hands of anarchistic publishers and Ger- man-paid rag wavers — but he haunts me — Just leaving everything worth while " Bume 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 — Ger- many stood for everything repugnant to him ; for ma- terialism and the direction of tremendous licentious force; it was just that Burne's face stayed in his mem- ory 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 Gkiethe's i64 THIS SIDE OF PARADISE on Ms 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?" "Irifantry or aviation, I can't make up my mind — I hate mechanics, but then of course avia:tion's the thing for me " "I feel as Amory does," said Tom. "Infantry or aviation — aviation sounds like the romantic aide of the war, of course — ^like cavalry used to be, you know; but !ike Amory I don't know a horse-power from a piston- rod." Somehow Amory's dissatisfaction with his lack of enthusiasm culminated in an attempt to put the blame for the whole war on the ancestors of his generation . . . all the people who cheered for Germany in 1870. . . . All the materialists rampant, all the idolizers of German science and efficiency. So he sat one day in an Eng- lish lecture and heard "Locksley Hall" quoted and fell into a brown study with contempt for Tennyson and all he stood for — for he took him as a representative of the Victorians. "Victorians, Victorians, wko never learned to weep Who sowed the bitter harvest that your children go to reap " scribbled Amory in his note-book. The lecturer was saying something about Tennyson's solidity and fifty heads were bent to take notes. Amory turned over to a fresh page and began scrawling again. " They shuddered when they found what Mr. Darwin was about, They shuddered when the waltz came in and Neivnian hurried oat " But the waltz came in much earlier; he crossed tliat out. NARCISSUS OFF DUTY 165 "And entitled A Song in the Time of Order" came the professor's voice, droning far away. "Time of Order" — Good Lord ! Everything crammed in the box and the Victorians sitting on the lid smiling serenely. . . . With Browning in his Italian villa crying bravely: "All's for the best." Amory scribbled again. " You knelt up in the temple and he bent to hear you pray, You thanked him for your 'glorious gains' — reproached him for 'Cathay:" Why could he never get more than a couplet at a time ? Now he needed something to rh3Tne with: " You would keep Him straight with science, tho Be had gone wrens, before ..." Well, anyway. . . . " You met yam children in your home — 'I've fixed it up I' you cried, Took your fifty years of Europe, and then iiirtuously — died." "That was to a great extent Tennyson's idea," came the lecturer's voice. "Swinburne's Song in the Time of Order might well have been Teimyson's title. He Ideal- ized order against chaos, against waste." At last Amory had it. He turned over another page and scrawled vigorously for the twenty minutes that was left of the hour. Then he walked up to the desk and dqx)sited a page torn out of his note-book. "Here's a poem to the Victorians, sir," he said coldly. The professor picked it up curiously while Amory backed rapidly through the door. Here is what he had written: "Smtgs in the time of order You left for us to sing. Proofs with excluded middles, Answers to life in rhyme, i66 THIS SIDE OF PARADISE Keys of the prison warder And ancient bells to ring, Time was the end of riddles, We were the end of time . . . Here were domestic oceans And a sky that we might reach, Guns and a guarded border, Gantlets — but not to fling. Thousands of old emotions And a platitude for each, Songs in the time of order-^ And tongues, that we might sing." The End of Many Things Early April slipped by in a haze — a haze of long eve- nings on the club veranda with the graphophone play- ing "Poor Butterfly" inside ... for "Poor Butterfly" had been the song of that last year. The war seemed scarcely to touch them and it might have been one of the senior springs of the past, except for the drilling every other afternoon, yet Amory realized poignantly that this was the last spring under the old regime. "This is the great protest against the superman," said Amory. "I suppose so," Alec agreed. "He's absolutely irreconcilable with any Utopia. As long as he occurs, there's trouble and all the latent evil that makes a crowd Hst and sway when he talks." "And of course all that he is is a gifted man with- out a moral sense." "That's all. I think the worst thing to contemplate is this — it's all happened before, how soon will it happen again? Fifty years after Waterloo Napoleon was as much a hero to English school children as Wellington. How do we know our grandchildren won't idolize X'^on Hindenburg the same way?" NARCISSUS OFF DUTY 167 "What brings it about?" "Time, damn it, and the historian. If we could only learn to look on evil as evil, whether it's clothed in filth or monotony or magnificence." "God ! Haven't we raked the universe over the coals for four years?" Then the night came that was to be the last. Tom and Amory, bound in the morning for different training- camps, paced the shadowy walks as usual and seemed still to see around them the faces of the men they knew. "The grass is full of ghosts to-night." "The whole campus is alive with them." They paused by Little and watched the moon rise, to make silver of the slate roof of Dodd and blue the rus- tling trees. "You know," whispered Tom, "what we feel now is the sense of all the gorgeous youth that has rioted through here in two hundred years. A last burst of singing flooded up from Blair Arch — broken voices for some long parting. "And what we leave here is more than this class; it's the whole heritage of youth. We're just one genera- tion — we're breaking all the links that seemed to bind us here to top-booted and high-stocked generations. We've walked arm and arm with Burr and Light-Horse Harry Lee through half these deep-blue nights." "That's what they are," Tom tangented off, "deep blue — a bit of color would spoil them, make them exotic. Spires, against a sky that's a promise of dawn, and blue light on the slate roofs — it hurts . . . rather " "Good-by, Aaron Burr," Amory called toward de- serted Nassau Hall, "you and I knew strange corners of life." His voice echoed in the stillness. i68 THIS SIDE OF PAIfNAGE and Alec go out there is a pause. RosALiOT) still stares moodily at the fireplace. Amory goes to her and puts his arm around her.) Amory: Darling girl. {They kiss. Another pause and then she seizes his hand, covers it with kisses and holds it to her breast) Rosalind: {Sadly) I love your hands, more than any- thing. I see them often when you're away from me — so tired ; I know every line of them. Dear hands ! {Their eyes meet for a second and then she begins to cry — a tearless sobbing) Amory: Rosalind! Rosalind : Oh, we're so darned pitiful ! Amory: Rosalind! Rosalind : Oh, I want to die ! Amory: Rosalind, another night of this and I'll go to pieces. You've been this way four days now. You've got to be more encouraging or I can't work or eat or sleep. {He looks around helplessly as if searching for new words to clothe an old, shop-worn phrase.) We'll have to 2o6 THIS SIDE OF PARADISE ?nake a start. I like having to make a start together. {His forced hopefulness fades as he sees her unresponsive.) "What's the matter ? {He gets up suddenly and starts to pace the floor.) It's Dawson Ryder, that's what it is. He's been working on your nerves. You've been with him every afternoon for a week. People come and tell me they've seen you together, and I have to smile and nod and pretend it hasn't the slightest significance for me. And you won't tell me anything as it develops. Rosalind: Amory, if you don't sit down I'll scream. Amory: {Sitting down suddenly beside her) Oh, Lord. Rosalind: (Taking his hand gently) You know I love you, don't you? Amory: Yes. Rosalind: You know I'U always love you Amory: Don't talk that way; you frighten me. It sounds as if we weren't going to have each other. {She cries a little and rising from the couch goes to the armchair.) I've felt aU afternoon that things were worse. I nearly went wild down at the office — couldn't write a line. Tell me everything. Rosalind: There's nothing to tell, I say. I'm just nervous. Amory: Rosalind, you're playing with the idea of marrying Dawson Ryder. Rosalind: {After a pause) He's been asking me to all day. Amory: Well, he's got his nerve ! Rosalind: {After /mother pause) I like him. Amory: Don't say that. It hurts me. Rosalind: Don't be a silly idiot. You know you're the only man I've ever loved, ever will love. Amory: {Quickly) Rosalind, let's get married — next week. Rosalind: We can't. THE DEBUTANTE 207 Amory: Why not? Rosalind: Oh, we can't. I'd be your squaw — in some horrible place. Amory: We'll have two hundred and seventy-five dollars a month all told. Rosalind: Darling, I don't even do my own hair, usually. Amory: I'll do it for you. Rosalind : (Between a laugh and a sob) Thanks. Amory: Rosalind, you can't be thinking of marrying some one else. Tell me ! You leave me in the dark. I can help you fight it out if you'll only tell me. Rosalind: It's just — us. We're pitiful, that's all. The very qualities I love you for are the ones that will always make you a failure. Amory: (Grimly) Go on. Rosalind: Oh — it is Dawson Ryder. He's so re- liable, I almost feel that he'd be a — si background. Amory: You don't love him. Rosalind: I know, but I respect him, and he's a good man and a strong one. Amory: (Grudgingly) Yes — he's that. Rosalind: Well — here's one little thing. There was a little poor boy we met in Rye Tuesday afternoon — and, oh, Dawson took him on his lap and talked to him and promised him an Indian suit — and next day he re- membered and bought it — and, oh, it was so sweet and I couldn't help thinking he'd be so nice to — to our chil- dren — take care of them — and I wouldn't have to worry. Amory: (In despair) Rosalind! Rosalind! Rosalind: (With a faint roguishness) Don't look so consciously suffering. Amory: What power we have of hurting each other ! Rosalind: (Commencing to sob again) It's been so perfect — you and I. So like a dream that I'd longed for 2o8 THIS SIDE OF PARADISE and never thought I'd find. The first real unselfishness I've ever felt in my life. And I can't see it fade out in a colorless atmosphcFe ! Amory: It won't — it won't! Rosalind : I'd rather keep it as a beautiful memory — tucked away in my heart. Amory: Yes, women can do that — but not men. I'd remember always, not the beauty of it while it lasted, but just the bitterness, the long bitterness. Rosalind: Don't! Amory: AU the years never to see you, never to kiss you, just a gate shut and barred — you don't dare be my wife. Rosalind: No — ^no — I'm taking the hardest course, the strongest course. Marrying you would be a failure and I never fail — if you don't stop walking up-and down I'll scream ! (Again he sinks despairingly onto the lounge.) Amory: Come over here and kiss me. Rosalind: No. Amory: Don't you want to kiss me? Rosalind: To-night I want you to love me cahnly and coolly. Amory: The beginning of the end. Rosalind: (With a burst of insight) Amory, you're young. I'm yoxmg. People excuse us now for our poses and vanities, for treating people like Sancho and jet getting away with it. They excuse us now. But you've got a lot of knocks coming to you Amory: And you're afraid to take them with me. Rosalind: No, not that. There was a poem I read somewhere — ^you'll say Ella Wheeler Wilcox and laugh — but listen: "For this is wisdom — to love and live, To take what fate or the gods may give, THE DEBUTANTE 209 To ask no question, to make no prayer, To kiss the lips and caress the hair, Speed passion's ebb as we greet its flow, To have and to hold, and, in time — ^let go." Amory: But we haven't had. Rosalind: Amory, I'm yours — ^you know it. There have been times in the last month I'd have been com- pletely yours if you'd said so. But I can't marry you and ruin both our lives. Amory: We've got to take our chance for happiness. Rosalind : Dawson says I'd learn to love him. (Amory with his head sunk in his hands does not move. The life seems suddenly gone out of him) Rosalind: Lover! Lover! I can't do with you, and I can't imagine life without you. Amory: Rosalind, we're on each other's nerves. It's just that we're both high-strung, and this week {His voice is curiously old. She crosses to him and taking his face in her hands, kisses him.) Rosalind: I can't, Amory. I can't be shut away from the trees and flowers, cooped up in a little flat, waiting for you. You'd hate me in a narrow atmosphere. I'd make you hate me. (Again she is blinded by sudden uncontrolled tears.} Amory: Rosalind Rosalind: Oh, darling, go — Don't make it harder! I can't stand it Amory (His face drawn, his voice strained) Do you know what you're saying? Do you mean forever? (There is a difference somehow in the quality of their suffering.) Rosalind: Can't you see Amory: I'm afraid I can't if you love me. You're afraid of taking two years' knocks with me. Rosalind: I wouldn't be the Rosalind you love. 2IO THIS SIDE OF PARADISE Amory: (A little hysterically) 1 can't give you up ! I can't, that's all I I've got to have you ! Rosalind: (4 hard note in her voice) You're being a baby now. Amory: {Wildly) I don't care ! You're spoiling our lives ! Rosalind: I'm doing the wise thing, the only thing. Amory: Are you going to marry Dawson Ryder? Rosalind: Oh, don't ask me. You know I'm old in some ways — in others — well, I'm just a little girl. I like sunshine and pretty things and cheerfulness — and I dread responsibility. I don't want to think about pots and kitchens and brooms. I want to worry whether my legs will get slick and browu when I swim in the summer. Amory: And you love me. Rosalind: That's just why it has to end. Drifting hurts too much. We can't have any more scenes like this. {She draws his ring from her finger and hands it to him. Their eyes blind again with tears.) Amory: {His lips against her wet cheek) Don't ! Keep it, please — oh, don't break my heart ! {She presses the ring softly into his hand.) Rosalind {Brokenly) You'd better go. Amory: Good-by {She looks at him once more, with infinite longing, infinite sadness.) RosALnro: Don't ever forget me, Amory Amory: Good-by {He goes to the door, fumbles for the knob, finds it — she sees him throw back his head — and he is gone. Gone — she half starts from the lounge and then sinks forward on her face into the pillows.) Rosalind : Oh, God, I want to die ! {After a moment she rises and with her eyes closed feels her way to the door. THE DEBUTANTE 211 Then she turns and looks once more at the room. Mere they had sat and dreamed: that tray she had so often filled with matches for him; that shade that they had discreetly low- ered one long Sunday afternoon. Misty-eyed she stands and remembers; she speaks aloud.) Oh, Amory, what have I done to you? {And deep under the aching sadness that mil pass in time, Rosalind feels that she has lost some- thing, she knows not what, she knows not why.) CHAPTER II EXPERIMENTS IN CONVALESCENCE The Knickerbocker Bar, beamed upon by Maxfield Parrish's jovial, colorful "Old King Cole," was well crowded. Amory stopped in the entrance and looked at his wrist-watch; he wanted particularly to know the time, for something in his mind that catalogued and classified liked to chip things off cleanly. Later it would satisfy him in a vague way to be able to think "that thing ended at exactly twenty minures after eight on Thursday, June lo, 1919." This was allowing for the walk from her house — a walk concerning which he had afterward not the faintest recollection. He was in rather grotesque condition: two days of worry and nervousness, of sleepless nights, of untouched meals, culminating in the emotional crisis and Rosa- lind's abrupt decision — the strain of it had drugged the foregroimd of his mind into a merciful coma. As he fumbled clumsily with the olives at the free-lunch table, a man approached and spoke to him, and the olives dropped from his nervous hands. "Well, Amory ..." It was some one he had known at Princeton; he had no idea of the name. "Hello, old boy — " he heard himself sa3ang. "Name's Jim Wilson — ^you've forgotten." "Sure, you bet, Jim. I remember." "Going to reunion?" "You know!" Simultaneously he realized that he was not going to reunion. "Get overseas?" EXPERIMENTS IN CONVALESCENCE 213 Amory nodded, his eyes staring oddly. Stepping back to let some one pass, he knocked the dish of olives to a crash on the floor. "Too bad," he muttered. "Have a drink?" Wilson, ponderously diplomatic, reached over and slapped him on the back. "You've had plenty, old boy." Amory eyed him dumbly until Wilson grew em- barrassed under the scrutiny. "Plenty, hell ! " said Amory finally. "I haven't had a drink to-day." Wilson looked incredulous. "Have a drink or not?" cried Amory rudely. Together they sought the bar. "Rye high." "I'll just take a Bronx." Wilson had another; Amory had several more. They decided to sit down. At ten o'clock Wilson was dis- placed by Carling, class of '15. Amory, his head spinning gorgeously, layer upon layer of soft satisfac- tion setting over the bruised spots of his spirit, was dis- coursing volubly on the war. " 'S a mental was'e," he insisted with owl-like wis- dom. "Two years my life spent inalleshual vacuity. Los' idealism, got be physcal anmal," he shook his fist expressively at Old King Cole, "got be Prussian 'bout ev'thing, women 'specially. Use' be straight 'bout women college. Now don'givadam." He expressed his lack of principle by sweeping a seltzer bottle with a broad gesture to noisy extinction on the floor, but this did not interrupt his speech. "Seek pleasure where find it for to-morrow die. 'At's philos'phy for me now on." Carling yawned, but Amory, waxing brilliant, con- tinued: "Use' wonder 'bout things — people satisfied com- 214 THIS SIDE OF PARADISE promise, fif'y-fif'y att'tude on life. Now don' wonder, don' wonder — " He became so emphatic in impressing on Carling the fact that he didn't wonder that he lost the thread of his discourse and concluded by announcing to the bar at large that he was a "physcal anmal." "What are you celebrating, Amory?" Amory leaned forward confidentially. "Cel'brating blowmylife. Great moment blow my life. Can't tell you 'bout it " He heard Carling addressing a remark to the bar- tender: "Give him a bromo-Seltzer." Amory shook his head indignantly. "None that stuff!", "But listen, Amory, you're making yourself sick. You're white as a ghost." Amory considered the question. He tried to look at himseK in the mirror but even by squinting up one eye could only see as far as the row of bottles behind the bar. "Like som'n solid. We go get some — some salad." He settled his coat with an attempt at nonchalance, but letting go of the bar was too much for him, and he slumped against a chair. "We'll go over to Shanley's," suggested Carling, of- fering an elbow. With this assistance Amory managed to get his legs in motion enough to propel him across Forty-second Street. Shanley's was very dim. He was conscious that he was talking in a loud voice, very succinctly and con- vincingly, he thought, about a desire to crush people under his heel. He consumed three club sandwiches, devouring each as though it were no larger than a choco- late-drop. Then Rosalind began popping into his mind again, and he found his lips forming her name over and over. Next he was sleepy, and he had a hazy, listless EXPERIMENTS IN CONVALESCENCE 215 sense of people in dress suits, probably waiters, gathering around the table. ... ... He was in a room and Carling was sayiog some- thing about a knot in his shoe-lace. "Nemmine," he managed to articulate drowsily. "Sleep in 'em. ..." Still Alcoholic He awoke laughing and his eyes lazily roamed his surroundings, evidently a bedroom and bath in a good hotel. His head was whirring and picture after picture was forming and blurring and melting before his eyes, but beyond the desire to laugh he had no entirely con- scious reaction. He reached for the 'phone beside his bed. "Hello— what hotel is this—? "Knickerbocker? All right, send up two rye high- balls " He lay for a moment and wondered idly whether they'd send up a bottle or just two of those little glass con- tainers. Then, with an effort, he struggled out of bed and ambled into the bathroom. When he emerged, rubbing himself lazily with a towel, he found the bar boy with the drinks and had a sudden desire to kid him. On reflection he decided that this would be undignified, so he waved him away. As the new alcohol tumbled into his stomach and wanned him, the isolated pictures began slowly to form a cinema reel of the day before. Again he saw Rosalind curled weeping among the pillows, again he felt her tears against his cheek. Her words began ringing in his ears: "Don't ever forget me, Amory — don't ever forget me " "Hell!" he faltered aloud, and then he choked and 2i6 THIS SIDE OF PARADISE ■collapsed on the bed in a shaken spasm of grief. After a minute he opened his eyes and regarded the ceiling. "Damned fool!" he exclaimed in disgust, and with a voluminous sigh rose and approached the bottle. After another glass he gave way loosely to the luxury of tears. Purposely he called up into his mind little incidents of the vanished spring, phrased to himself emotions that, would make him react even more strongly to sorrow. "We were so happy," he intoned dramatically, "so very happy." Then he gave way again and knelt be- side the bed, his head half-buried in the pillow. "My own girl — ^my own — Oh " He clinched his teet^ so that the tears streamed in a flood from his eyes. "Oh . . . my baby girl, all I had, all I wanted ! . . . Oh, my girl, come back, come back ! I need you . . . need you . . . we're so pitiful . . . just misery we brought each other. . . . She'll be shut away from me. ... I can't see her; I can't be her friend. It's got to be that way — ^it's got to be " And then again: "We've been so happy, so very happy. ..." He rose to his feet and threw himself on the bed in an ecstasy of sentiment, and then lay exhausted while he realized slowly that he had been very drunk the night before, and that his head was spinning again wildly. Pie laughed, rose, and crossed again to Lethe. . . . At noon he ran into a crowd in the Biltmore bar, and the riot began again. He had a vague recollection after- ward of discussing French poetry with a British ofl&cer who was introduced to him as "Captain Corn, of his Majesty's Foot," and he remembered attempting to re- cite " Clair de Lune" at luncheon; then he slept in a big, soft chair until almost five o'clock when another crowd found and woke him; there followed an alcoholic dress- EXPERIMENTS IN CONVALESCENCE 217 ing of several temperaments for the ordeal of dinner. They selected theatre tickets at Tyson's for a play that had a four-drink programme — a play with two monoto- nous voices, with turbid, gloomy scenes, and lighting effects that were hard to follow when his eyes behaved so amazingly. He imagined afterward that it must have been "The Jest." . . . . . . Then the Cocoanut Grove, where Amory slept again on a little balcony outside. " Out in Shanley's, Yonkers, he became almost logical, and by a careful control of the number of high-balls he drank, grew quite lucid and garrulous. He found that the party con- sisted of five men, two of whom he knew slightly; he became righteous about paying his share of the expense and insisted in a loud voice on arranging everything then and there to the amusement of the tables around him. . . . Some one mentioned that a famous cabaret star was at the next table, so Amory rose and, approaching gal- lantly, introduced himself . . . this involved him in an argument, first with her escort and then with the head- waiter — ^Amory's attitude. being a lofty and exaggerated courtesy . . . he consented, after being confronted with irrefutable logic, to being led back to his own table. "Decided to commit suicide," he announced sud- denly. "When? Next year?" "Now. To-morrow morning. Going to take a room at the Commodore, get into a hot bath and open a vein." "He's getting morbid!" "You need another rye, old boy!" "We'U all talk it over to-morrow." But Amory was not to be dissuaded, from argument at least. 2i8 THIS SIDE OF PARADISE "Did you ever get that way?" he demanded con- fidentially fortaccio. "Sure!" "Often?" "My chronic state." This provoked discussion. One man said that he got so depressed sometimes that he seriously considered it. Another agreed that there was nothing to live for. "Captain Com," who had somehow rejoined the party, said that in his opinion it was when one's health was bad that one felt that way most. Amory's suggestion was that they should each order a Bronx, mix broken glass in it, and drink it off. To his relief no one ap- plauded the idea, so having finished his high-ball, he balanced his chin in his hand and his elbow on the table — a most delicate, scarcely noticeable sleeping position, he assured himself — and went into a deep stupor. . . . He was awakened by a woman clinging to him, a pretty woman, with brown, disarranged hair and dark blue eyes. "Take me home!" she cried. "Hello!" said Amory, blinking. "I like you," she announced tenderly. "I like you too." He noticed that there was a noisy man in the back- ground and that one of his party was arguing with him. "Fella I was with's a damn fool," confided the blue- eyed woman. "I hate him- I want to go home with you." "You drunk?" queried Amory with intense wisdom. She nodded coyly. "Go home with him," he advised gravely. "He brought you." EXPERIMENTS IN CONVALESCENCE 219 At this point the noisy man in the background broke away from his detainers and approached. "Say!" he said fiercely. "I brought this girl out here and you're butting in !" Amory regarded him coldly, while the girl clung to him closer. "You let go that girl!" cried the noisy man. Amory tried to make his eyes threatening. "You go to hell !" he directed finally, and turned his attention to the girl. ■ "Love first sight," he suggested. "I love you," she breathed and nestled close to him. She did have beautiful eyes. Some one leaned over and spoke in Amory's ear. "That's just Margaret Diamond. She's drunk and this fellow here brought her. Better let her go." "Let him take care of her, then!" shouted Amory furiously. "I'm no W. Y. C. A. worker, am I? — am I?" "Let her go!" "It's her hanging on, damn it! Let her hang!" The crowd around the table thickened. For an in- stant a brawl threatened, but a sleek waiter bent back Margaret Diamond's fingers imtil she released her hold on Amory, whereupon she slapped the waiter furiously in the face and flung her arms about her raging original escort. "Oh, Lord!" cried Amory. "Let's go!" "Come on, the taxis are getting scarce!" "Check, waiter." "C'mon, Amory. Your romance is over." Amory laughed. "You don't know how true you spoke. No idea. 'At's the whole trouble." 220 THIS SIDE OF PARADISE Amory on the Labor Qxjestion Two mornings later he knocked at the president's door at Bascome and Barlow's advertising agency. "Come in!" Amory entered unsteadily. " 'Morning, Mr. Barlow." Mr. Barlow brought his glasses to the inspection and set his mouth slightly ajar that he might better listen. "Well, Mr. Blaine. We haven't seen you for several days." "No," said Amory. "I'm quitting." "WeU— well— this is " "I don't like it here." "I'm sorry. I thought our relations had been quite — ah — pleasant. You seemed to be a hard worker — a little inclined perhaps to write fancy copy " "I just got tired of it," interrupted Amory rudely. "It didn't matter a damn to me. whether Harebell's flour was any better than any one else's. In fact, I never ate any of it. So I got tired of telling people about it — oh, I know I've been drinking " Mr. Barlow's face steeled by several ingots of ex- pression. "You asked for a position " Amory waved him to silence. "And I think I was rottenly underpaid. Thirty-five dollars, a week — less than a good carpenter." "You had just started. You'd never worked before," said Mr. Barlow coolly. "But it took about ten thousand doUars to educate me where I could write your darned stuff for you. Anyway, as far as length of service goes, you've got stenographers here you've paid fifteen a week for five years." EXPERIMENTS IN CONVALESCENCE 221 "I'm not going to argue with you, sir," said Mr. Barlow rising. "Neither am I. I just wanted to tell you I'm quit- ting." They stood for a moment looking at each other im- passively and then Amory turned and left the office. A Little Lxjll Four days after that he returned at last to the apart- ment. Tom was engaged on a book review for The New Democracy on the staff of which he was employed. They regarded each other for a moment in silence. "Well.?" "Well?" "Good Lord, Amory, where'd you get the black eye — and the jaw?" Amory laughed. "That's a mere nothing." He peeled off his coat and bared his shoidders. "Look here!" Tom emitted a low whistle. "What hit you?" Amory laughed again. "Oh, a lot of people. I got beaten up. Fact." He slowly replaced his shirt. "It was bound to come sooner or later and I wouldn't have missed it for anything." "Who was it?" "Well, there were some waiters and a couple of sailors and a few stray pedestrians, I guess. It's the strangest feeling. You ought to get beaten up just for the experi- ence of it. You fall down after a while and everybody sort of slashes in at you before you hit the ground — then they kick you." Tom lighted a cigarette. 222 THIS SIDE OF PARADISE "I spent a day chasing you all over town, Amory. But you always kept a little ahead of me. I'd say you've been on some party." Amory tumbled into a chair and asked for a ciga- rette. "You sober now?" asked Tom quizzically. "Pretty sober. Why?" "Well, Alec has left. His family had been after him , to go home and live, so he " A spasm of pain shook Amory. "Too bad." "Yes, it is too bad. We'll have to get some one else if we're going to stay here. The rent's going up." "Sure. Get anybody. I'll leave it to you, Tom." Amory walked into his bedroom. The first thing that met his glance was a photograph of Rosalind that he had intended to have framed, propped up against a mirror on his dresser. He looked at it unmoved. After the vivid mental pictures of her that were his portion at present, the portrait was curiously imreal. He went back into the study. "Got a cardboard box?" "No," answered Tom, puzzled. "Why should I have? Oh, yes — there may be one in Alec's room." Eventually Amory found what he was looking for and, returning to his dresser, opened a drawer full of letters, notes, part of a chain, two little handkerchiefs, and some snap-shots. As he transferred them carefully to the box his mind wandered to some place in a book where the hero, after preserving for a year a cake of his lost love's soap, finally washed his hands with it. He laughed and began to hum "After you've gone" . . . ceased abruptly. . . The string broke twice, and then he managed to se- cure it, dropped the package into the bottom of his EXPERIMENTS IN CONVALESCENCE 223 trunk, and having slammed the lid returned to the study. "Going out?" Tom's voice held an tmdertone of anxiety. "Uh-huh." "Where?" "Couldn't say, old keed." "Let's have dinner together." "Sorry. I told Sukey Brett I'd eat with him." "Oh." "By-by." Amory crossed the street and had a high-ball; then he walked to Washington Square and foimd a top seat on a bus. He disembarked at Forty-third Street and strolled to the Biltmore bar. "Hi, Amory!" "What'll you have?" "Yoho! Waiter!" Temperature Normal The advent of prohibition with the "thirsty-first" put a sudden stop to the submerging of Amory's sor-' rows, and when he awoke one morning to find that the old bar-to-bar days were over, he had neither remorse for the past three weeks nor regret that their repetition was impossible. He had taken the most violent, if the weakest, method to shield himself from the stabs of memory, and while it was not a course he would have prescribed for others, he found in the end that it had done its business: he was over the first flush of pain. Don't misunderstand ! Amory had loved Rosalind as he would never love another living person. She had taken the first flush of his youth and brought from his unplumbed depths tenderness that had surprised him, 224 THIS SIDE OF PARADISE gentleness and unselfishness that he had never given to another creature. He had later love-affairs, but of a different sort: in those he went back to that, perhaps, more t3^ical frame of mind, in which the girl became the mirror of a mood in him. Rosalind had drawn out what was more than passionate admiration; he had a deep, undying affection for Rosalind. But there had been, near the end, so much dramatic tragedy, culminating in the arabesque nightmare of his three weeks' spree, that he was emotionally worn out. The people and surroundings that he remembered as being cool or delicately artificial, seemed to promise him a refuge. He wrote a cynical story which featured his father's funeral and despatched it to a magazine, re- ceiving in return a check for sixty dollars and a request for more of the same tone. This tickled his vanity, but inspired him to no further effort. He read enormously. He was puzzled and depressed by "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man"; in- tensely interested by "Joan and Peter" and "The Un- dying Fire," and rather surprised by his discovery through a critic named Mencken of several excellent American novels: "Vandover and the Brute," "The Damnation of Theron Ware," and "Jenny Gerhardt." McKenzie, Chesterton, Galsworthy, Bennet, had sunk in his appreciation from sagacious, life-saturated geniuses to merely diverting contemporaries. Shaw's aloof clarity and brilliant consistency and the gloriously in- toxicated efforts of H. G. Wells to fit the key of romantic S3Tiimetry into the elusive lock of truth, alone won his rapt attention. He wanted to see Monsignor Darcy, to whom he had written when he landed, but he had not heard from him; besides he knew that a visit to Monsignor would entail the story of Rosalind, and the thought of repeat- ing it turned him cold with horror. EXPERIMENTS IN CONVALESCENCE 225 In liis search for cool people he remembered Mrs. Lawrence, a very intelligent, very dignified lady, a convert to the church, and a great devotee of Mon- signor's. He called her on the 'phone one day. Yes, she re- membered him perfectly; no, Monsignor wasn't in town, was in Boston she thought; he'd promised to come to dinner when he returned. Couldn't Amory take luncheon with her? "I thought I'd better catch up, Mrs. Lawrence," he said rather ambiguously when he arrived. "Monsignor was here just last week," said Mrs. Lawrence regretfully. "He was very anxious to see you, but he'd left your address at home." "Did he think I'd plunged into Bolshevism?" ai^ed Amory, interested. "Oh, he's having a frightful time." "Why?" "About the Irish Republic. He thinks it lacks dig- nity." "So?" "He went to Boston when the Irish President arrived and he was greatly distressed because the receiving committee, when they rode in an automobile, would put their arms around the President." "I don't blame him." "Well, what impressed you more than anything while you were in the army? You look a great deal older." "That's from another, more disastrous battle," he answered, smiling in spite of himself. "But the army — let me see — ^well, I discovered that physical courage de- pends to a great extent on the physical shape a man is in. I found that I was as brave as the next man — it used to worry me before." "What else?" "Well, the idea that men can stand anything if they 226 THIS SIDE OF PARADISE get used to it, and the fact that I got a high mark in the psychological examination." Mrs. Lawrence laughed. Amory was finding it a great relief to be in this cool house on Riverside Drive, away from more condensed New York and the sense of people expelling great quantities of breath into a Uttle space. Mrs. Lawrence reminded him vaguely of Bea- trice, not in temperament, but in her perfect grace and dignity. The house, its furnishings, the manner in which dinner was served, were in immense contrast to what he had met in the great places on Long Island, where the servants were so obtrusive that they had positively to be bumped out of the way, or even in the houses of more conservative "Union Club" families. He wondered if this air of symmetrical restraint, this grace, which he felt was continental, was distilled through Mrs. Lawrence's New England ancestry or acquired in long residence in Italy and Spain. Two glasses of sauterne at luncheon loosened his tongue, and he talked, with what he felt was something of his old charm, of religion and literature and the menacing phenomena of the social order. Mrs. Lawrence was ostensibly pleased with him, and her interest was especially in his mind; he wanted people to like his mind again — after a while it might be such a nice place in which to live. "Monsignor Darcy still thinks that you're his re- incarnation, that your faith will eventually clarify." "Perhaps," he assented. "I'm rather pagan at pres- ent. It's just that religion doesn't seem to have the slightest bearing on Kfe at my age." When he left her house he walked down Riverside Drive with a feeUng of satisfaction. It was amusing to discuss again such subjects as this young poet, Stephen Vincent BenSt, or the Irish Republic. Between llie rancid accusations of Edward Carson and Justice EXPERIMENTS IN CONVALESCENCE 227 Cohalan he had completely tired of the Irish question; yet there had been a time when his own Celtic traits were pillars of his personal philosophy. There seemed suddenly to be much left in life, if only this revival of old interests did not mean that he was backing away from it again — backing away from life itself. Restlessness "I'm tres old and tres bored, Tom," said Amory one day, stretching himself at ease in the comfortable win- dow-seat. He always felt most natural in a recumbent position. "You used to be entertaining before you started to write," he continued. "Now you save any idea that you think would do to print." Existence had settled back to an ambitionless normal- ity. They had decided that with economy they could still a£Ford the apartment, which Tom, with the domes- ticity of an elderly cat, had grown fond of. The old English hunting prints on the wall were Tom's, and the large tapestry by courtesy, a relic of decadent days in college, and the great profusion of orphaned candle- sticks and the carved Louis XV chair in which no one could sit more than a minute without acute spinal dis- orders — ^Tom claimed that this was because one was sitting in the lap of Montespan's wraith — at any rate, it was Tom's furniture that decided them to stay. They went out very little: to an occasional play, or to dinner at the Ritz or the Princeton Club. With pro- hibition the great rendevouz had received their death wounds; no longer could one wander to the Biltmore bar at twelve or five and find congenial spirits, and both Tom and Amory had outgrown the passion for dancing with mid- Western or New Jersey debbies at the Club- de-Vingt (surnamed the "Club de Gink") or the Plaza 22& THIS SIDE OF PARADISE Rose Room — besides even that required several cock- tails "to come down to the intellectual level of the women present," as Amory had once put it to a horrified matron. . Amory had lately received several alarmmg letters from Mr. Barton — the Lake Geneva house was too large to be easily rented; the best rent obtainable at present would serve this year to little more than pay for the taxes and necessary improvements; in fact, the lawyer sug- gested that the whole property was simply a white ele- phant on Amory's hands. Nevertheless, even though it might not yield a cent for the next three years, Amory decided with a vague sentimentality that for the present, at any rate, he would not sell the house. This particular day on which he announced his ennui to Tom had been quite typical. He had risen at noon, lunchedwith Mrs. Lawrence, and then ridden abstract- edly homeward atop one of his beloved buses. "Why shouldn't you be bored," yawned Tom. "Isn't that the conventional frame of mind for the young man of your age and condition?" "Yes," said Amory speculatively, "but I'm more than bored; I restless." "Love and war did for you." "Well," Amory considered, "I'm not sure that the war itself had any great efifect on either you or me — but it certainly ruined the old backgrounds, sort of killed individualism out of our generation." Tom looked up in surprise. "Yes it did," insisted Amory. "I'm not sure it didn't kill it out of the whole world. Oh, Lord, what a pleasure it used to be to dream I might be a really great dictator or writer or religious or political leader — and now even a Leonardo da Vinci or Lorenzo de Medici couldn't be a real old-fashioned bolt in the world. Life EXPERIMENTS IN CONVALESCENCE 229 is too huge and complex. The world is so overgrown that it can't lift its own fingers, and I was planning ta be such an important finger r "I don't agree with you," Tom interrupted. "There never were men placed in such egotistic positions since -^oh, since the French Revolution." Amory disagreed violently. "You're mistaking this period when every nut is an individualist for a period of individualism. Wilson has only been powerful when he has represented; he's had to compromise over and over again. Just as soon as Trot- sky and Lenine take a definite, consistent stand they'll become merely two-minute figures like Kerenski. Evea Foch hasn't half the significance of Stonewall Jackson. War used to be the most individualistic pursuit of man, and yet the popular heroes of the war had neither authority nor responsibility: Gurmieyer and Sergeant York. How could a schoolboy make a hero of Pershing ? A big man has no time really to do anything but just sit and be big." "Then you don't think there will be any more per- manent world heroes?" "Yes — in history — not in life. Carlyle would have difficulty getting material for a new chapter on 'The Hero as a Big Man.'" "Go on. I'm a good listener to-day." "People try so hard to believe in leaders now, piti- fully hard. But we no sooner get a popular reformer or politician or soldier or writer or philosopher — a Roose- velt, a Tolstoi, a Wood, a Shaw, a Nietzsche, than the cross-currents of criticism wash him away. My Lord, no man can stand prominence these days. It's the surest path to obscurity. People get sick of hearing the same name over and over." "Then you blame it on the press?" 230 THIS SIDE OF PARADISE "Absolutely. Look at you; you're on The New De- mocracy, considered the most brilliant weekly in the country, read by the men who do things and all that. What's your business ? Why, to be as clever, as interest- ing, and as brilliantly cynical as possible about every man, doctrine, book, or policy that is assigned you to deal with. The more strong lights, the more spiritual scandal you can throw on the matter, the more money they pay you, the more the people buy the issue. You, Tom d'Invilliers, a blighted Shelley, changing, shifting, clever, unscrupulous, represent the critical consciousness of the race — Oh, don't protest, I know the stuff. I used to write book reviews in college; I considered it rare sport to refer to the latest honest, conscientious effort to propound a theory or a remedy as a 'welcome ad- dition to our light summer reading.' Come on now, ad- mit it." Tom laughed, and Amory continued triumphantly. "We want to believe. Yoimg students try to believe in older authors, constituents try to believe in their Congressmen, countries try to believe in their states- men, but they can't. Too many voices, too much scat- tered, illogical, ill-considered criticism. It's worse in the case of newspapers. Any rich, unprogressive old party with that particularly grasping, acquisitive form of mentality known as financial genius can own a paper that is the intellectual meat and drink of thou- sands of tired, hurried men, men too involved in the business of modem living to swallow anything but predigested food. For two cents the voter buys his pohtics, prejudices, and philosophy. A year later there is a new political ring or a change in the paper's owner- ship, consequence: more confusion, more contradiction, a rudden inrush of new ideas, their tempering, their dis- tillation, the reaction against them " EXPERIMENTS IN CONVALESCENCE 231 He paused only to get his breath. "And that is why I have sworn not to put pen to paper, until my ideas either clarify or depart entirely; I have quite enough sins on my soul without putting dangerous, shallow epigrams into people's heads; I might cause a poor, inoffensive capitalist to have a vul- gar liaison with a bomb, or get some innocent little Bolshevik tangled up with a machine-gun bullet " Tom was growing restless under this lampooning of his connection with The New Democracy. "What's all this got to do with your being bored?" Amory considered that it had much to do with it. "How'U I fit in?" he demanded. "What am I for? To propagate the race? According to the American novels we are led to believe that the 'healthy American boy' from nineteen to twenty-five is an entirely sexless animal. As a matter of fact, the healthier he is the less that's true. The only alternative to letting it get you is some violent interest. Well, the war is over; I believe too much in the responsibilities of authorship to write just now; and business, well, business speaks for itself. It has no connection with anything in the world that I've ever been interested in, except a slim, utilitarian connection with economics. What I'd see of it, lost in a clerkship, for the next and best ten years of my life would have the intellectual content of an industrial movie." "Try fiction," suggested Tom. "Trouble is I get distracted when I start to write stories — ^get afraid I'm doing it instead of living — get thinking maybe life is waiting for me in the Japanese gardens at the Ritz or at Atlantic City or on the lower East Side. "An)Tvay," he continued, "I haven't the vital urge. I wanted to be a regular human being but the girl couldn't see it that way." 232 THIS SIDE OF PARADISE "You'll find another." "God ! Banish the thought. Why don't you tell me that 'if the girl had been worth having she'd have waited for you'? No, sir, the girl really worth having won't wait for anybody. If I thought there'd be an- other I'd lose my remaining faith in human nature. Maybe I'll play — but Rosalind was the only girl in the wide world that could have held me." "Well," yawned Tom, "I've played confidant a good hour by the clock. Still, I'm glad to see you're begin- ning to have violent views again on something." "I am," agreed Amory reluctantly. "Yet when I see a happy family it makes me sick at my stomach " "Happy families try to make people feel that way," said Tom cynically. Tom the Censor There were days when Amory listened. These were when Tom, wreathed in smoke, indulged in the slaughter of American literature. Words failed him. "Fifty thousand dollars a year," he would cry. "My God! Look at them, look at them — Edna Ferber, Gouveneer Morris, Fanny Hurst, Mary Roberts Rine- hart — ^not producing among 'em one story or novel that will last ten years. This man Cobb — I don't think he's either clever or amusing — and what's more, I don't think very many people do, except the editors. He's just groggy with advertising. And — oh Harold Bell Wright oh Zane Grey " "They try." "No, they don't even try. Some of them can write, but they won't sit down and do one honest novel. Most of them can't write, I'll admit. I believe Rupert Hughes tries to give a real, comprehensive picture of EXPERIMENTS IN CONVALESCENCE 233 American life, but his style and perspective are bar- barous. Ernest Poole and Dorothy Canfield try but they're hindered by their absolute lack of any sense of humor; but at least they crowd their work instead 9f spreading it thin. Every author ought to write every book as if he were going to be beheaded the day he finished it." "Is that double entente?" "Don't slow me up ! Now there's a few of 'em that seem to Iiave some cultural background, some intelli- gence and a good deal of literary felicity but they just simply won't write honestly; they'd all claim there was no public for good stuff. Then why the devil is it that -Wells, Conrad, Galsworthy, Shaw, Bennet, and the rest depend on America for over half their sales ? " "How does little Tommy like the poets?" Tom was overcome. He dropped his arms until they swung loosely beside the chair and emitted faint grunts. "I'm writing a satire on 'em now, calling it 'Boston Bards and Hearst Reviewers.' " "Let's hear it," said Amory eagerly. "I've only got the last few lines done." "That's very modern. Let's hear 'em, if they're funny." Tom produced a folded paper from his pocket and read aloud, pausing at intervals so that Amory could see that it was free verse: "So Walter Arensberg, Alfred Kreymborg, Carl Sandburg, Louis Untermeyer, Eunice Tietjens, Clara Shanafelt, James Oppenheim, Maxwell Bodenheim, 234 THIS SIDE OF PARADISE Richard Glaenzer, Scharmel Iris, ^ Conrad Aiken, I place your names here So that you may live If only as names, Sinuous, maiive-colored names, In the Juvenaha Of my collected editions." Amory roared. "You win the iron pansy. I'll buy you a meal on the arrogance of the last two lines." Amory did not entirely agree with Tom's sweeping damnation of American novelists and poets. He en- joyed both Vachel Lindsay and Booth Tarkington, and admired > the conscientious, if slender, artistry of Edgar Lee Masters. '/What I hate is this idiotic drivel about 'I am God — I am man — I ride the winds — I took through the smoke — I am the life sense.' " "It's ghastly!" "And I wish American novelists would give up trying to make business romantically interesting. Nobody wants to read about it, unless it's crooked business. If it was an entertaining subject they'd buy the life of James J. Hill and not one of these long office tragedies that harp along on the significance of smoke " "And gloom," said Tom. "That's another favorite, though I'll admit the Russians have the monopoly. Our specialty is stories about little girls who break their spines and get adopted by grouchy old men because they smile so much. You'd think we were a race of cheerful cripples and that the common end of the Russian peasant was suicide " "Six o'clock," said Amory, glancing at his wrist- EXPERIMENTS IN CONVALESCENCE 235 watch. "I'll buy you a grea' big dinner on the strength of the Juvenalia of your collected editions." Looking Backwaed July sweltered out with a last hot week, and Amory in another surge of unrest realized that it was just five months since he and Rosalind had met. Yet it was already hard for him to visualize the heart-whole boy who had stepped off the transport, passionately desiring the adventure of Hfe. One night while the heat, over- powering and enervating, poured into the windows of his room he struggled for several hours in a vague ef- fort to immortalize the poignancy of that time. The February streets, wind-washed by night, blow full of strange half-intermittent damps, bearing on wasted walks in shining sight, wet snow plashed into gleams under the lamps, like golden oil from some divine rrmchine, in an hour of thaw and stars. Strange damps— full of the eyes of many men, crowded with life borne in iipon a lull. . . . Oh, I was young, for T could turn again to you, most finite and most beautiful, and taste ihe stuff of half-remembered dreams, sweet and fi€w on your mouth. . . . There was a tanging in the midnight air — silence ivas dead and sound not yet awoken — life cracked like ice! One brilliant note and there, radiant and pale, you stood . . . and spring had broken.. (The icicles were short upon the roofs and the changeling city swooned.) Our thoughts were frosty mist along the eaves; our two ghosts kissed, high on the long, mazed wires — eerie half- laughter echoes here and leaves only a fatuous sigh for young desires; regret has followed after things she loved, leaving the great husk. 236 THIS SIDE OF PARADISE Another Ending In mid-August came a letter from Monsignor Darcy, who had evidently just stumbled on his address: My dear Boy: — Your last letter was quite enough to make me worry about you. It was not a bit like yourself. Reading between the lines I should imagine that your engagement to this girl is making you rather unhappy, and I see j'ou have lost all the feeling of romance that you had before the war. You make a great mis- take if you think you can be romantic without religion. Some- times I think that with both of us the secret of success, when we find it, is the mystical element in us: something flows into us that enlarges our personalities, and when it ebbs out our personalities shrink; I should call your last two letters rather shrivelled. Beware of losing yourself in the personality of an- other being, man or woman. His Eminence Cardinal O'Neill and the Bishop of Boston are staying with me at present, so it is hard for me to get a moment to write, but I wish you would come up here later if only for a week-end. I go to Washington this week. What I shall do in the future is hanging in the balance. Absolutely between ourselves I should not be surprised to see the red hat of a cardinal descend upon my unworthy head within the next eight months. In any event, I should like to have a house in New York or Washington where you could drop in for week-ends. Amory, I'm very glad we're both alive ; this war could easilj' have been the end of a briUiant family. But in regard to matri- mony, you are now at the most dangerous period of your life. You might marry in haste and repent at leisure, but I think you won't. From what you write me about the present calamitous state of your finances, what you want is naturally impossible. However, if I judge you by the means I usually choose, I should say that there will be something of an emotional crisis within the next year. Do write me. I feel annoyingly out of date on you. With greatest affection, Thayer Darcy. EXPERIMENTS IN CONVALESCENCE 237 Within a week after the receipt of this letter their little household fell precipitously to pieces. The im- mediate cause was the serious and probably chronic illness of Tom's mother. So they stored the furniture, gave instructions to sublet and shook hands gloomily in the Pennsylvania Station. Amory and Tom seemed always to be saying good-by. Feeling very much alone, Amory 3aelded to an im- pulse and set off southward, intending to join Monsignor in Washington. They missed connections by two hours, and, deciding to spend a few days with an ancient, re- membered uncle, Amory journeyed up through the luxu- riant fields of Maryland into RamiUy County. But in- stead of two days his stay lasted from mid- August nearly through September, for in Maryland he met Eleanor, CHAPTER III YOUNG IRONY Foe years afterward when Amory thought of Eleanor he seemed still to hear the wind sobbing around him and sending little chills into the places beside his heart. The night when they rode up the slope and watched the cold moon float through the clouds, he lost a further part of him that nothing could restore; and when he lost it he lost also the power of regretting it. Eleanor was, say, the last time that evil crept close to Amory under the mask of beauty, the last weird mystery that held him with wild fascination and pounded his soul to flakes. With her his imagination ran riot and that is why they rode to the highest hill and watched an evil moon ride high, for they knew then that they could see the devil in each other. But Eleanor — did Amory dream her? Afterw^ard their ghosts played, yet both of them hoped from their souls never to meet. Was it the infinite sadness of her eyes that drew him or the mirror of him- self that he found in the gorgeous clarity of her mind ? She will have no other adventure like Amory, and if she reads this she will say: "And Amory will have no other adventure like me." Nor will she sigh, any more than he would sigh. Eleanor tried to put it on paper once: "The fading things we only know We'll have forgotten . . . Put away . . . Desires that melted with the snow, 238 YOUNG IRONY 239 And dreams begotten This to-day: The sudden dawns we laughed to greet, That all could see, that none could share, Will be but dawns . . . and if we meet We shall not care. Dear . . . not one tear will rise for this . . , A little while hence No regret Will stir for a remembered kiss — Not even silence, When we've met, Will give old ghosts a waste to roam, Or stir the surface of the sea . . . k If gray shapes drift beneath the foam We shall not see." They quarrelled dangerously because Amory main- tained that sea and see couldn't possibly be used as a rh3^me. And then Eleanor had part of another verse that she couldn't find a beginning for: "... But wisdom passes . . . still the years Will feed us wisdom. . . . Age will go Back to the old — For all our tears We shall not know." Eleanor hated Maryland passionately. She belonged to the oldest of the old families of Ramilly County and liA'ed in a big, gloomy house with her grandfather. She had been born and brought up in France. ... I see I am starting wrong. Let me begin again. Amory was bored, as he usually was in the country. He used to go for far walks by himself — and wander along reciting "Ulalume" to the corn-fields, and con- gratulating Poe for drinking himself to death in that at- m osphere of smiling complacency. One afternoon he had strolled for several miles along a road that was new to 240 THIS SIDE OF PARADISE him, and then through a wood on bad advice from a colored woman . . . losing himself entirely. A passing storm decided to break out, and to his great impatience the sky grew black as pitch and the rain began to splatter down through the trees, become suddenly furtive and ghostly. Thunder rolled with menacing crashes up the valley and scattered through the woods in intermittent batteries. He stumbled blindly on, hunting for a way out, and finally, through webs of twisted branches, caught sight of a rift in the trees where the unbroken lightning showed open country. He rushed to the edge of the woods and then hesitated whether or not to cross the fields and try to reach the shelter of the little house marked by a light far down the valley. It was only half past five, but he could see scarcely ten steps be- fore him, except when the lightning made everything vivid and grotesque for great sweeps around. Suddenly a strange sound fell on his ears. It was a song, in a low, husky voice, a girl's voice, and whoever was singing was very close to him. A year before he might have laughed, or trembled; but in his restless mood he only stood and listened while the words sank into his consciousness: "Les sanglots longs Des inolons De I'auiomne Blessent mon caur D'une langeur Monotdne." The lightning split the sky, but the song went on without a quaver. The girl was evidently in the field and the voice seemed to come vaguely from a haystack about twenty feet in front of him. Then it ceased; ceased and began again in a weird YOUNG IRONY 241 chant that soared and hung and fell and blended with the rain: " Tout suffocant Et blSme quand Sonne I'heure Je me souviens Des jours anciens Etje pleure. . . " "Who the devil is there in Ramilly County," mut- tered Amory aloud, "who would deliver Verlaine in an extemporaneous tune to a soaking haystack?" "Somebody's there!" cried the voice unalarmed. "Who are you? — Manfred, St. Christopher, or Queen Victoria?" "I'm Don Juan !" Amory shouted on impulse, raising his voice above the noise of the rain and the wind. A delighted shriek came from the haystack. ."I know who you are — ^you're the blond boy that likes 'Ulalmne' — I recognize your voice." "How do I get up ? " he cried from the foot of the hay- stack, whither he had arrived, dripping wet. A head appeared over the edge — it was so dark that Amory could just make out a patch of damp hair and two eyes that gleamed like a cat's. "Run back!" came the voice, "and jump and I'll catch your hand — no, not there — on the other side." He followed directions and as he sprawled up the side, knee-deep in hay, a small, white hand reached out, gripped his, and helped him onto the top. "Here you are, Juan," cried she of the damp hair. "Do you mind if I drop the Don?" "You've got a thumb like mine I" he exclaimed. "And you're holding my hand, which is dangerous without seeing my face." He dropped it quickly. As if in answer to his prayers came a flash of light- 242 THIS SIDE OF PARADISE ning and he looked eagerly at her who stood beside him on the soggy haystack, ten feet above the ground. But she had covered her face and he saw nothing but a slender figure, dark, damp, bobbed hair, and the small white hands with the thumbs that bent back like his. "Sit down," she suggested politely, as the dark closed in on them. "If you'll sit opposite me in this hollow you can have half of the raincoat, which I was using as a water-proof tent until you so rudely interrupted me." "I was asked," Amory said joyfully; "you asked me — ^you know you did." "Don Juan always manages that," she said, laughing, "but I shan't call you that any more, because you've got reddish hair. Instead you can recite 'Ulalume' and I'll be Psyche, your soul." Amory flushed, happily invisible under the curtain of wind and rain. They were sitting opposite each other in a sHght hollow in the hay with the raincoat -spread o\'er most of them, and the rain doing for the rest. Amory was tr3dng desperately to see Psyche, but the lightning refused to flash again, and he waited im- patiently. Good Lord ! supposing she wasn't beautiful — supposing she was forty and pedantic — heavens ! Suppose, only suppose, she was mad. But he knew the last was unworthy. Here had Providence sent a girl to amuse him just as it sent Benvenuto Celleni men to murder, and he was wondering if she was mad, just be- cause she exactly filled his mood. "I'm not," she said. "Not what?" "Not mad. I didn't think you were mad when I first saw you, so it isn't fair that you should think so of me." "How on earth " As long as they knew each other Eleanor and Amory YOUNG IRONY 243 could be "on a subject" and stop talking with tbe defin- ite thought of it in their heads, yet ten minutes later speak aloud and find that their minds had follovred the same channels and led them each to a paraiJel idea, an idea that others would have found absolutely uncon- nected with the first. "Tell me," he demanded, leaning forward eagerly, "how do you know about 'Ulalume' — hov/ did you know the color of my hair ? What's your name ? What were you doing here? Tell me all at once !" Suddenly the lightning flashed in with a leap of over- reaching light and he saw Eleanor, and looked for the first time into those eyes of hers. Oh, she was mag- nificent — pale skin, the color of marble in starlight, slender brows, and eyes that glittered green as emer- alds in the blinding glare. She was a witch, of perhaps nineteen, he judged, alert and dreamy and with the tell-tale white line over her upper lip that was a weak- ness and a delight. He sank back with a gasp against the wall of hay. "Now you've seen me," she said calmly, "and I sup- pose you're about to say that my green eyes are bBrning into your brain." "What color is your hair?" he asked intently. "It's bobbed, isn't it?'' "Yes, it's bobbed. I don't know what color it is," she answered, musing, "so many men have asked me. It's medium, I suppose — No one ever looks long at my hair. I've got beautiful eyes, though, haven't I. I don't care what you say, I have beautiful eyes." "Answer my question, Madeline." "Don't remember them all — besides my name isn't Madeline, it's Eleanor." "I might have guessed it. You look like Eleanor — you have that Eleanor look. You know what I mean." 244 THIS SIDE OF PARADISE There was a silence as they listened to the rain. "It's going down my neck, fellow lunatic," she of- fered finally. "Answer my questions." "Well — ^name of Savage, Eleanor; live in big old house mile down road; nearest living relation to be notified, grandfather — Ramilly Savage; height, five feet four inches; number on watch-case, 3077 W; nose, deli- cate aquiline; temperament, uncanny " "And me," Amory interrupted, "where did you see me?" "Oh, you're one of those men," she answered haught- ily, "must hig old self into conversation. Well, my boy, I was behind a hedge sunning myself one day last week, and along comes a man saying in a pleasant, conceited way of talking: " 'And now when the night was senescent' (says he) ' And the star dials pointed to mom At the end of the path a liquescent' (says he) 'And nebulous lustre was born.' So I poked my eyes up over the hedge, but you had started to run, for some unknown reason, and so I saw but the back of your beautiful head. 'Oh!' says I, ' there's a man for whom many of us might sigh,' and I continued in my best Irish " "All right," Amory interrupted. "Now go back to yourself." ' ' Well, I will. I'm one of those people who go through the world giving other people thrills, but getting few myself except those I read into men on such nights as these. I have the social courage to go on the stage, but not the energy; I haven't the patience to write YOUNG IRONY 245 books; and I never met a man I'd marry. However, I'm only eighteen." ^ The storm was dying down softly and only the wind kept up its ghostly surge and made the stack lean and gravely settle from side to side. Amory was in a trance. He felt that every moment was precious. He had never met a girl like this before — she would never seem quite the same again. He didn't at all feel like a character in a play, the appropriate feeling in an unconven- tional situation — instead, he had a sense of coming home. "I have just made a great decision," said Eleanor after another pause, "and that is why I'm here, to an- swer another of your questions. I have just decided that I don't beUeve in immortality." "Really! how banal!" "Frightfully so," she answered, "but depressing with a stale, sickly depression, nevertheless. I came out here to get wet — like a wet hen; wet hens always have great clarity of mind," she concluded. " Go on," Amory said politely. "Well — I'm not afraid of the dark, so I put on my slicker and rubber boots and came out. You see I was always afraid, before, to say I didn't believe ia God — because the lightning might strike me — but here I am and it hasn't, of course, but the main point is that this time I wasn't any more afraid of it than I had been when I was a Christian Scientist, like I was last year. So now I know I'm a materialist and I was fraternizing with the hay when you came out and stoodiiy the woods, scared to death." "Why, you little wretch — " cried Amory indignantly. "Scared of what?" "Yourself!" she shouted, and he jumped. She clapped her hands and laughed. "See — see! Conscience — kill 246 THIS SIDE OF PARADISE it like me ! Eleanor Savage, materiologist — ^no jumping, no starting, come early " "But I have to have a soul," he objected. "I can't be rational — and I won't be molecular." She leaned toward him, her burning eyes never leav- ing Hs own and whispered with a sort of romantic finality: "I thought so, Juan, I feared so — ^you're sentimental. You're not like me. I'm a romantic little materialist." "I'm not sentimental — ^I'm as romantic as you are. Th« idea, you know, is that the sentimental person thinks things will last — the romantic person has a desperate confidence that they won't." (This was an ancient distinction of Amory's.) "Epigrams. I'm going home," she said sadly. "Let's get off the haystack and walk to the cross-roads." They slowly descended from their perch. She would not let him help her down and motioning him away arrived in a graceful lump in the soft mud where she sat for an instant, laughing at herself. Then she jumped to her feet and slipped her hand into his, and they tip- toed across the fields, jumping and swinging from dry spot to dry spot. A transcendent delight seemed to sparkle in every pool of water, for the moon had risen and the storm had scurried away into western Mary- land. When Eleanor's arm touched his he felt his hands grow cold with deadly fear lest he should lose the shadow brush with which his imagination was painting wonders of her. He watched her from the corners of his eyes as ever he did when he walked with her — she was a feast and a folly and he wished it had been his des- tiny to sit forever on a haystack and see life through her green eyes. His paganism soared that night and when she faded out like a gray ghost down the road, a deep singing came out of the fields and filled his way home- YOUNG IRONY 247 ward. All night the summer moths flitted in and out of Amory's window; all night large looming sounds swayed in mystic revery through the silver grain — and he lay awake in the clear darkness. September Amory selected a blade of grass and nibbled at it scientifically. "I never fall in love in August or September,'' he proffered. "When then?" "Christmas or Easter. I'm a liturgist." "Easter!" She turned up her nose. "Huh! Spring in corse|;s!" "Easter would bore spring, wouldn't she? Easter has her hair braided, wears a tailored suit." " Bind on thy sandals, oh, thou most fleet. Over the splendor and speed of thy feet " quoted Eleanor softly, and then added: "I suppose Hallowe'en is a better day for autumn than Thanks- giving." "M