CHAPTER 2. Spires and Gargoyles 6 page

and all that are hung out, you need never bother about anybody; you can

cope with them without difficulty."

"But, on the other hand, if I haven't my possessions, I'm helpless!"

"Absolutely."

"That's certainly an idea."

"Now you've a clean start--a start Kerry or Sloane can constitutionally

never have. You brushed three or four ornaments down, and, in a fit of

pique, knocked off the rest of them. The thing now is to collect some

new ones, and the farther you look ahead in the collecting the better.

But remember, do the next thing!"

"How clear you can make things!"

So they talked, often about themselves, sometimes of philosophy and

religion, and life as respectively a game or a mystery. The priest

seemed to guess Amory's thoughts before they were clear in his own head,

so closely related were their minds in form and groove.

"Why do I make lists?" Amory asked him one night. "Lists of all sorts of

things?"

"Because you're a mediaevalist," Monsignor answered. "We both are. It's

the passion for classifying and finding a type."

"It's a desire to get something definite."

"It's the nucleus of scholastic philosophy."

"I was beginning to think I was growing eccentric till I came up here.

It was a pose, I guess."

"Don't worry about that; for you not posing may be the biggest pose of

all. Pose--"

"Yes?"

"But do the next thing."

After Amory returned to college he received several letters from

Monsignor which gave him more egotistic food for consumption.

I am afraid that I gave you too much assurance of your inevitable

safety, and you must remember that I did that through faith in

your springs of effort; not in the silly conviction that you will

arrive without struggle. Some nuances of character you will have

to take for granted in yourself, though you must be careful in

confessing them to others. You are unsentimental, almost incapable

of affection, astute without being cunning and vain without being

proud.

Don't let yourself feel worthless; often through life you will

really be at your worst when you seem to think best of yourself;

and don't worry about losing your "personality," as you persist

in calling it; at fifteen you had the radiance of early morning,

at twenty you will begin to have the melancholy brilliance of

the moon, and when you are my age you will give out, as I do,

the genial golden warmth of 4 P.M.

If you write me letters, please let them be natural ones. Your

last, that dissertation on architecture, was perfectly awful--

so "highbrow" that I picture you living in an intellectual and

emotional vacuum; and beware of trying to classify people too

definitely into types; you will find that all through their youth

they will persist annoyingly in jumping from class to class, and

by pasting a supercilious label on every one you meet you are

merely packing a Jack-in-the-box that will spring up and leer at

you when you begin to come into really antagonistic contact with

the world. An idealization of some such a man as Leonardo da

Vinci would be a more valuable beacon to you at present.

You are bound to go up and down, just as I did in my youth, but

do keep your clarity of mind, and if fools or sages dare to

criticise don't blame yourself too much.

You say that convention is all that really keeps you straight in

this "woman proposition"; but it's more than that, Amory; it's

the fear that what you begin you can't stop; you would run amuck,

and I know whereof I speak; it's that half-miraculous sixth sense

by which you detect evil, it's the half-realized fear of God in

your heart.

Whatever your metier proves to be--religion, architecture,

literature--I'm sure you would be much safer anchored to the

Church, but I won't risk my influence by arguing with you even

though I am secretly sure that the "black chasm of Romanism"

yawns beneath you. Do write me soon.

With affectionate regards, THAYER DARCY.

Even Amory's reading paled during this period; he delved further into

the misty side streets of literature: Huysmans, Walter Pater, Theophile

Gautier, and the racier sections of Rabelais, Boccaccio, Petronius, and

Suetonius. One week, through general curiosity, he inspected the private

libraries of his classmates and found Sloane's as typical as any: sets

of Kipling, O. Henry, John Fox, Jr., and Richard Harding Davis; "What

Every Middle-Aged Woman Ought to Know," "The Spell of the Yukon";

a "gift" copy of James Whitcomb Riley, an assortment of battered,

annotated schoolbooks, and, finally, to his surprise, one of his own

late discoveries, the collected poems of Rupert Brooke.

Together with Tom D'Invilliers, he sought among the lights of Princeton

for some one who might found the Great American Poetic Tradition.

The undergraduate body itself was rather more interesting that year than

had been the entirely Philistine Princeton of two years before. Things

had livened surprisingly, though at the sacrifice of much of the

spontaneous charm of freshman year. In the old Princeton they would

never have discovered Tanaduke Wylie. Tanaduke was a sophomore, with

tremendous ears and a way of saying, "The earth swirls down through

the ominous moons of preconsidered generations!" that made them vaguely

wonder why it did not sound quite clear, but never question that it was

the utterance of a supersoul. At least so Tom and Amory took him. They

told him in all earnestness that he had a mind like Shelley's, and

featured his ultrafree free verse and prose poetry in the Nassau

Literary Magazine. But Tanaduke's genius absorbed the many colors of the

age, and he took to the Bohemian life, to their great disappointment. He

talked of Greenwich Village now instead of "noon-swirled moons," and

met winter muses, unacademic, and cloistered by Forty-second Street

and Broadway, instead of the Shelleyan dream-children with whom he had

regaled their expectant appreciation. So they surrendered Tanaduke to

the futurists, deciding that he and his flaming ties would do better

there. Tom gave him the final advice that he should stop writing for two

years and read the complete works of Alexander Pope four times, but on

Amory's suggestion that Pope for Tanaduke was like foot-ease for stomach

trouble, they withdrew in laughter, and called it a coin's toss whether

this genius was too big or too petty for them.

Amory rather scornfully avoided the popular professors who dispensed

easy epigrams and thimblefuls of Chartreuse to groups of admirers every

night. He was disappointed, too, at the air of general uncertainty on

every subject that seemed linked with the pedantic temperament; his

opinions took shape in a miniature satire called "In a Lecture-Room,"

which he persuaded Tom to print in the Nassau Lit.

"Good-morning, Fool...

Three times a week

You hold us helpless while you speak,

Teasing our thirsty souls with the

Sleek 'yeas' of your philosophy...

Well, here we are, your hundred sheep,

Tune up, play on, pour forth... we sleep...

You are a student, so they say;

You hammered out the other day

A syllabus, from what we know

Of some forgotten folio;

You'd sniffled through an era's must,

Filling your nostrils up with dust,

And then, arising from your knees,

Published, in one gigantic sneeze...

But here's a neighbor on my right,

An Eager Ass, considered bright;

Asker of questions.... How he'll stand,

With earnest air and fidgy hand,

After this hour, telling you

He sat all night and burrowed through

Your book.... Oh, you'll be coy and he

Will simulate precosity,

And pedants both, you'll smile and smirk,

And leer, and hasten back to work....

'Twas this day week, sir, you returned

A theme of mine, from which I learned

(Through various comment on the side

Which you had scrawled) that I defied

The _highest rules of criticism_

For _cheap_ and _careless_ witticism....

'Are you quite sure that this could be?'

And

'Shaw is no authority!'

But Eager Ass, with what he's sent,

Plays havoc with your best per cent.

Still--still I meet you here and there...

When Shakespeare's played you hold a chair,

And some defunct, moth-eaten star

Enchants the mental prig you are...

A radical comes down and shocks

The atheistic orthodox?

You're representing Common Sense,

Mouth open, in the audience.

And, sometimes, even chapel lures

That conscious tolerance of yours,

That broad and beaming view of truth

(Including Kant and General Booth...)

And so from shock to shock you live,

A hollow, pale affirmative...

The hour's up... and roused from rest

One hundred children of the blest

Cheat you a word or two with feet

That down the noisy aisle-ways beat...

Forget on _narrow-minded earth_

The Mighty Yawn that gave you birth."

In April, Kerry Holiday left college and sailed for France to enroll in

the Lafayette Esquadrille. Amory's envy and admiration of this step

was drowned in an experience of his own to which he never succeeded in

giving an appropriate value, but which, nevertheless, haunted him for

three years afterward.

*****

THE DEVIL

Healy's they left at twelve and taxied to Bistolary's. There were Axia

Marlowe and Phoebe Column, from the Summer Garden show, Fred Sloane

and Amory. The evening was so very young that they felt ridiculous with

surplus energy, and burst into the cafe like Dionysian revellers.

"Table for four in the middle of the floor," yelled Phoebe. "Hurry, old

dear, tell 'em we're here!"

"Tell 'em to play 'Admiration'!" shouted Sloane. "You two order; Phoebe

and I are going to shake a wicked calf," and they sailed off in the

muddled crowd. Axia and Amory, acquaintances of an hour, jostled behind

a waiter to a table at a point of vantage; there they took seats and

watched.

"There's Findle Margotson, from New Haven!" she cried above the uproar.

"'Lo, Findle! Whoo-ee!"

"Oh, Axia!" he shouted in salutation. "C'mon over to our table." "No!"

Amory whispered.

"Can't do it, Findle; I'm with somebody else! Call me up to-morrow about

one o'clock!"

Findle, a nondescript man-about-Bisty's, answered incoherently and

turned back to the brilliant blonde whom he was endeavoring to steer

around the room.

"There's a natural damn fool," commented Amory.

"Oh, he's all right. Here's the old jitney waiter. If you ask me, I want

a double Daiquiri."

"Make it four."

The crowd whirled and changed and shifted. They were mostly from the

colleges, with a scattering of the male refuse of Broadway, and women of

two types, the higher of which was the chorus girl. On the whole it was

a typical crowd, and their party as typical as any. About three-fourths

of the whole business was for effect and therefore harmless, ended at

the door of the cafe, soon enough for the five-o'clock train back to

Yale or Princeton; about one-fourth continued on into the dimmer hours

and gathered strange dust from strange places. Their party was scheduled

to be one of the harmless kind. Fred Sloane and Phoebe Column were old

friends; Axia and Amory new ones. But strange things are prepared even

in the dead of night, and the unusual, which lurks least in the cafe,

home of the prosaic and inevitable, was preparing to spoil for him

the waning romance of Broadway. The way it took was so inexpressibly

terrible, so unbelievable, that afterward he never thought of it as

experience; but it was a scene from a misty tragedy, played far behind

the veil, and that it meant something definite he knew.

About one o'clock they moved to Maxim's, and two found them in

Deviniere's. Sloane had been drinking consecutively and was in a state

of unsteady exhilaration, but Amory was quite tiresomely sober; they

had run across none of those ancient, corrupt buyers of champagne who

usually assisted their New York parties. They were just through dancing

and were making their way back to their chairs when Amory became aware

that some one at a near-by table was looking at him. He turned and

glanced casually... a middle-aged man dressed in a brown sack suit, it

was, sitting a little apart at a table by himself and watching their

party intently. At Amory's glance he smiled faintly. Amory turned to

Fred, who was just sitting down.

"Who's that pale fool watching us?" he complained indignantly.

"Where?" cried Sloane. "We'll have him thrown out!" He rose to his feet

and swayed back and forth, clinging to his chair. "Where is he?"

Axia and Phoebe suddenly leaned and whispered to each other across the

table, and before Amory realized it they found themselves on their way

to the door.

"Where now?"

"Up to the flat," suggested Phoebe. "We've got brandy and fizz--and

everything's slow down here to-night."

Amory considered quickly. He hadn't been drinking, and decided that if

he took no more, it would be reasonably discreet for him to trot along

in the party. In fact, it would be, perhaps, the thing to do in order to

keep an eye on Sloane, who was not in a state to do his own thinking. So

he took Axia's arm and, piling intimately into a taxicab, they drove out

over the hundreds and drew up at a tall, white-stone apartment-house.

... Never would he forget that street.... It was a broad street, lined

on both sides with just such tall, white-stone buildings, dotted with

dark windows; they stretched along as far as the eye could see, flooded

with a bright moonlight that gave them a calcium pallor. He imagined

each one to have an elevator and a colored hall-boy and a key-rack; each

one to be eight stories high and full of three and four room suites. He

was rather glad to walk into the cheeriness of Phoebe's living-room and

sink onto a sofa, while the girls went rummaging for food.

"Phoebe's great stuff," confided Sloane, sotto voce.

"I'm only going to stay half an hour," Amory said sternly. He wondered

if it sounded priggish.

"Hell y' say," protested Sloane. "We're here now--don't le's rush."

"I don't like this place," Amory said sulkily, "and I don't want any

food."

Phoebe reappeared with sandwiches, brandy bottle, siphon, and four

glasses.

"Amory, pour 'em out," she said, "and we'll drink to Fred Sloane, who

has a rare, distinguished edge."

"Yes," said Axia, coming in, "and Amory. I like Amory." She sat down

beside him and laid her yellow head on his shoulder.

"I'll pour," said Sloane; "you use siphon, Phoebe."

They filled the tray with glasses.

"Ready, here she goes!"

Amory hesitated, glass in hand.

There was a minute while temptation crept over him like a warm wind,

and his imagination turned to fire, and he took the glass from Phoebe's

hand. That was all; for at the second that his decision came, he looked

up and saw, ten yards from him, the man who had been in the cafe, and

with his jump of astonishment the glass fell from his uplifted hand.

There the man half sat, half leaned against a pile of pillows on the

corner divan. His face was cast in the same yellow wax as in the cafe,

neither the dull, pasty color of a dead man--rather a sort of virile

pallor--nor unhealthy, you'd have called it; but like a strong man who'd

worked in a mine or done night shifts in a damp climate. Amory looked

him over carefully and later he could have drawn him after a fashion,

down to the merest details. His mouth was the kind that is called frank,

and he had steady gray eyes that moved slowly from one to the other

of their group, with just the shade of a questioning expression. Amory

noticed his hands; they weren't fine at all, but they had versatility

and a tenuous strength... they were nervous hands that sat lightly

along the cushions and moved constantly with little jerky openings and

closings. Then, suddenly, Amory perceived the feet, and with a rush of

blood to the head he realized he was afraid. The feet were all wrong ...

with a sort of wrongness that he felt rather than knew.... It was like

weakness in a good woman, or blood on satin; one of those terrible

incongruities that shake little things in the back of the brain. He wore

no shoes, but, instead, a sort of half moccasin, pointed, though, like

the shoes they wore in the fourteenth century, and with the little ends

curling up. They were a darkish brown and his toes seemed to fill them

to the end.... They were unutterably terrible....

He must have said something, or looked something, for Axia's voice came

out of the void with a strange goodness.

"Well, look at Amory! Poor old Amory's sick--old head going 'round?"

"Look at that man!" cried Amory, pointing toward the corner divan.

"You mean that purple zebra!" shrieked Axia facetiously. "Ooo-ee!

Amory's got a purple zebra watching him!"

Sloane laughed vacantly.

"Ole zebra gotcha, Amory?"

There was a silence.... The man regarded Amory quizzically.... Then the

human voices fell faintly on his ear:

"Thought you weren't drinking," remarked Axia sardonically, but her

voice was good to hear; the whole divan that held the man was alive;

alive like heat waves over asphalt, like wriggling worms....

"Come back! Come back!" Axia's arm fell on his. "Amory, dear, you aren't

going, Amory!" He was half-way to the door.

"Come on, Amory, stick 'th us!"

"Sick, are you?"

"Sit down a second!"

"Take some water."

"Take a little brandy...."

The elevator was close, and the colored boy was half asleep, paled to

a livid bronze... Axia's beseeching voice floated down the shaft. Those

feet... those feet...

As they settled to the lower floor the feet came into view in the sickly

electric light of the paved hall.

*****

IN THE ALLEY

Down the long street came the moon, and Amory turned his back on it and

walked. Ten, fifteen steps away sounded the footsteps. They were like a

slow dripping, with just the slightest insistence in their fall.

Amory's shadow lay, perhaps, ten feet ahead of him, and soft shoes was

presumably that far behind. With the instinct of a child Amory edged in

under the blue darkness of the white buildings, cleaving the moonlight

for haggard seconds, once bursting into a slow run with clumsy

stumblings. After that he stopped suddenly; he must keep hold, he

thought. His lips were dry and he licked them.

If he met any one good--were there any good people left in the world or

did they all live in white apartment-houses now? Was every one followed

in the moonlight? But if he met some one good who'd know what he meant

and hear this damned scuffle... then the scuffling grew suddenly nearer,

and a black cloud settled over the moon. When again the pale sheen

skimmed the cornices, it was almost beside him, and Amory thought he

heard a quiet breathing. Suddenly he realized that the footsteps were

not behind, had never been behind, they were ahead and he was not

eluding but following... following. He began to run, blindly, his heart

knocking heavily, his hands clinched. Far ahead a black dot showed

itself, resolved slowly into a human shape. But Amory was beyond that

now; he turned off the street and darted into an alley, narrow and

dark and smelling of old rottenness. He twisted down a long, sinuous

blackness, where the moonlight was shut away except for tiny glints

and patches... then suddenly sank panting into a corner by a fence,

exhausted. The steps ahead stopped, and he could hear them shift

slightly with a continuous motion, like waves around a dock.

He put his face in his hands and covered eyes and ears as well as

he could. During all this time it never occurred to him that he was

delirious or drunk. He had a sense of reality such as material things

could never give him. His intellectual content seemed to submit

passively to it, and it fitted like a glove everything that had ever

preceded it in his life. It did not muddle him. It was like a problem

whose answer he knew on paper, yet whose solution he was unable to

grasp. He was far beyond horror. He had sunk through the thin surface of

that, now moved in a region where the feet and the fear of white walls

were real, living things, things he must accept. Only far inside his

soul a little fire leaped and cried that something was pulling him down,

trying to get him inside a door and slam it behind him. After that door

was slammed there would be only footfalls and white buildings in the

moonlight, and perhaps he would be one of the footfalls.

During the five or ten minutes he waited in the shadow of the fence,

there was somehow this fire... that was as near as he could name it

afterward. He remembered calling aloud:

"I want some one stupid. Oh, send some one stupid!" This to the

black fence opposite him, in whose shadows the footsteps shuffled

... shuffled. He supposed "stupid" and "good" had become somehow

intermingled through previous association. When he called thus it was

not an act of will at all--will had turned him away from the moving

figure in the street; it was almost instinct that called, just the pile

on pile of inherent tradition or some wild prayer from way over the

night. Then something clanged like a low gong struck at a distance,

and before his eyes a face flashed over the two feet, a face pale and

distorted with a sort of infinite evil that twisted it like flame in

the wind; _but he knew, for the half instant that the gong tanged and

hummed, that it was the face of Dick Humbird._

Minutes later he sprang to his feet, realizing dimly that there was no

more sound, and that he was alone in the graying alley. It was cold, and

he started on a steady run for the light that showed the street at the

other end.

*****

AT THE WINDOW

It was late morning when he woke and found the telephone beside his bed

in the hotel tolling frantically, and remembered that he had left word

to be called at eleven. Sloane was snoring heavily, his clothes in a

pile by his bed. They dressed and ate breakfast in silence, and then

sauntered out to get some air. Amory's mind was working slowly, trying

to assimilate what had happened and separate from the chaotic imagery

that stacked his memory the bare shreds of truth. If the morning had

been cold and gray he could have grasped the reins of the past in an

instant, but it was one of those days that New York gets sometimes in

May, when the air on Fifth Avenue is a soft, light wine. How much or how

little Sloane remembered Amory did not care to know; he apparently had

none of the nervous tension that was gripping Amory and forcing his mind

back and forth like a shrieking saw.

Then Broadway broke upon them, and with the babel of noise and the

painted faces a sudden sickness rushed over Amory.

"For God's sake, let's go back! Let's get off of this--this place!"

Sloane looked at him in amazement.

"What do you mean?"

"This street, it's ghastly! Come on! let's get back to the Avenue!"

"Do you mean to say," said Sloane stolidly, "that 'cause you had some

sort of indigestion that made you act like a maniac last night, you're

never coming on Broadway again?"

Simultaneously Amory classed him with the crowd, and he seemed no longer

Sloane of the debonair humor and the happy personality, but only one of

the evil faces that whirled along the turbid stream.

"Man!" he shouted so loud that the people on the corner turned and

followed them with their eyes, "it's filthy, and if you can't see it,

you're filthy, too!"

"I can't help it," said Sloane doggedly. "What's the matter with you?

Old remorse getting you? You'd be in a fine state if you'd gone through

with our little party."

"I'm going, Fred," said Amory slowly. His knees were shaking under him,

and he knew that if he stayed another minute on this street he would

keel over where he stood. "I'll be at the Vanderbilt for lunch." And he

strode rapidly off and turned over to Fifth Avenue. Back at the hotel he

felt better, but as he walked into the barber-shop, intending to get a

head massage, the smell of the powders and tonics brought back Axia's

sidelong, suggestive smile, and he left hurriedly. In the doorway of his

room a sudden blackness flowed around him like a divided river.

When he came to himself he knew that several hours had passed. He

pitched onto the bed and rolled over on his face with a deadly fear that

he was going mad. He wanted people, people, some one sane and stupid and

good. He lay for he knew not how long without moving. He could feel

the little hot veins on his forehead standing out, and his terror had

hardened on him like plaster. He felt he was passing up again through

the thin crust of horror, and now only could he distinguish the shadowy

twilight he was leaving. He must have fallen asleep again, for when he

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