THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE SLICKER

From the scoffing superiority of sixth-form year and success Amory

looked back with cynical wonder on his status of the year before. He was

changed as completely as Amory Blaine could ever be changed. Amory plus

Beatrice plus two years in Minneapolis--these had been his ingredients

when he entered St. Regis'. But the Minneapolis years were not a thick

enough overlay to conceal the "Amory plus Beatrice" from the ferreting

eyes of a boarding-school, so St. Regis' had very painfully drilled

Beatrice out of him, and begun to lay down new and more conventional

planking on the fundamental Amory. But both St. Regis' and Amory were

unconscious of the fact that this fundamental Amory had not in himself

changed. Those qualities for which he had suffered, his moodiness, his

tendency to pose, his laziness, and his love of playing the fool, were

now taken as a matter of course, recognized eccentricities in a star

quarter-back, a clever actor, and the editor of the St. Regis Tattler:

it puzzled him to see impressionable small boys imitating the very

vanities that had not long ago been contemptible weaknesses.

After the football season he slumped into dreamy content. The night

of the pre-holiday dance he slipped away and went early to bed for the

pleasure of hearing the violin music cross the grass and come surging in

at his window. Many nights he lay there dreaming awake of secret cafes

in Mont Martre, where ivory women delved in romantic mysteries with

diplomats and soldiers of fortune, while orchestras played Hungarian

waltzes and the air was thick and exotic with intrigue and moonlight

and adventure. In the spring he read "L'Allegro," by request, and was

inspired to lyrical outpourings on the subject of Arcady and the pipes

of Pan. He moved his bed so that the sun would wake him at dawn that he

might dress and go out to the archaic swing that hung from an apple-tree

near the sixth-form house. Seating himself in this he would pump higher

and higher until he got the effect of swinging into the wide air, into

a fairyland of piping satyrs and nymphs with the faces of fair-haired

girls he passed in the streets of Eastchester. As the swing reached its

highest point, Arcady really lay just over the brow of a certain hill,

where the brown road dwindled out of sight in a golden dot.

He read voluminously all spring, the beginning of his eighteenth year:

"The Gentleman from Indiana," "The New Arabian Nights," "The Morals

of Marcus Ordeyne," "The Man Who Was Thursday," which he liked without

understanding; "Stover at Yale," that became somewhat of a text-book;

"Dombey and Son," because he thought he really should read better

stuff; Robert Chambers, David Graham Phillips, and E. Phillips Oppenheim

complete, and a scattering of Tennyson and Kipling. Of all his class

work only "L'Allegro" and some quality of rigid clarity in solid

geometry stirred his languid interest.

As June drew near, he felt the need of conversation to formulate his

own ideas, and, to his surprise, found a co-philosopher in Rahill, the

president of the sixth form. In many a talk, on the highroad or lying

belly-down along the edge of the baseball diamond, or late at night with

their cigarettes glowing in the dark, they threshed out the questions of

school, and there was developed the term "slicker."

"Got tobacco?" whispered Rahill one night, putting his head inside the

door five minutes after lights.

"Sure."

"I'm coming in."

"Take a couple of pillows and lie in the window-seat, why don't you."

Amory sat up in bed and lit a cigarette while Rahill settled for a

conversation. Rahill's favorite subject was the respective futures of

the sixth form, and Amory never tired of outlining them for his benefit.

"Ted Converse? 'At's easy. He'll fail his exams, tutor all summer at

Harstrum's, get into Sheff with about four conditions, and flunk out in

the middle of the freshman year. Then he'll go back West and raise hell

for a year or so; finally his father will make him go into the paint

business. He'll marry and have four sons, all bone heads. He'll always

think St. Regis's spoiled him, so he'll send his sons to day school in

Portland. He'll die of locomotor ataxia when he's forty-one, and

his wife will give a baptizing stand or whatever you call it to the

Presbyterian Church, with his name on it--"

"Hold up, Amory. That's too darned gloomy. How about yourself?"

"I'm in a superior class. You are, too. We're philosophers."

"I'm not."

"Sure you are. You've got a darn good head on you." But Amory knew that

nothing in the abstract, no theory or generality, ever moved Rahill

until he stubbed his toe upon the concrete minutiae of it.

"Haven't," insisted Rahill. "I let people impose on me here and don't

get anything out of it. I'm the prey of my friends, damn it--do their

lessons, get 'em out of trouble, pay 'em stupid summer visits, and

always entertain their kid sisters; keep my temper when they get selfish

and then they think they pay me back by voting for me and telling me I'm

the 'big man' of St. Regis's. I want to get where everybody does their

own work and I can tell people where to go. I'm tired of being nice to

every poor fish in school."

"You're not a slicker," said Amory suddenly.

"A what?"

"A slicker."

"What the devil's that?"

"Well, it's something that--that--there's a lot of them. You're not one,

and neither am I, though I am more than you are."

"Who is one? What makes you one?"

Amory considered.

"Why--why, I suppose that the _sign_ of it is when a fellow slicks his

hair back with water."

"Like Carstairs?"

"Yes--sure. He's a slicker."

They spent two evenings getting an exact definition. The slicker was

good-looking or clean-looking; he had brains, social brains, that is,

and he used all means on the broad path of honesty to get ahead,

be popular, admired, and never in trouble. He dressed well, was

particularly neat in appearance, and derived his name from the fact that

his hair was inevitably worn short, soaked in water or tonic, parted

in the middle, and slicked back as the current of fashion dictated. The

slickers of that year had adopted tortoise-shell spectacles as badges

of their slickerhood, and this made them so easy to recognize that Amory

and Rahill never missed one. The slicker seemed distributed through

school, always a little wiser and shrewder than his contemporaries,

managing some team or other, and keeping his cleverness carefully

concealed.

Amory found the slicker a most valuable classification until his junior

year in college, when the outline became so blurred and indeterminate

that it had to be subdivided many times, and became only a quality.

Amory's secret ideal had all the slicker qualifications, but, in

addition, courage and tremendous brains and talents--also Amory conceded

him a bizarre streak that was quite irreconcilable to the slicker

proper.

This was a first real break from the hypocrisy of school tradition. The

slicker was a definite element of success, differing intrinsically from

the prep school "big man."

"THE SLICKER"

1. Clever sense of social values.

2. Dresses well. Pretends that dress is superficial--but knows that it isn't.

3. Goes into such activities as he can shine in.

4. Gets to college and is, in a worldly way, successful.

5. Hair slicked.

"THE BIG MAN"

1. Inclined to stupidity and unconscious of social values.

2. Thinks dress is superficial, and is inclined to be

careless about it.

3. Goes out for everything from a sense of duty.

4. Gets to college and has a problematical future. Feels lost

without his circle, and always says that school days were

happiest, after all. Goes back to school and makes speeches

about what St. Regis's boys are doing.

5. Hair not slicked.

Amory had decided definitely on Princeton, even though he would be the

only boy entering that year from St. Regis'. Yale had a romance and

glamour from the tales of Minneapolis, and St. Regis' men who had been

"tapped for Skull and Bones," but Princeton drew him most, with

its atmosphere of bright colors and its alluring reputation as the

pleasantest country club in America. Dwarfed by the menacing college

exams, Amory's school days drifted into the past. Years afterward, when

he went back to St. Regis', he seemed to have forgotten the successes

of sixth-form year, and to be able to picture himself only as the

unadjustable boy who had hurried down corridors, jeered at by his rabid

contemporaries mad with common sense.

Date: 2015-02-16; view: 681