CHAPTER 2. Spires and Gargoyles 8 page insane."
On this point Amory could not agree. It seemed to him that life
and history were rife with the strong criminal, keen, but often
self-deluding; in politics and business one found him and among the
old statesmen and kings and generals; but Burne never agreed and their
courses began to split on that point.
Burne was drawing farther and farther away from the world about him. He
resigned the vice-presidency of the senior class and took to reading and
walking as almost his only pursuits. He voluntarily attended graduate
lectures in philosophy and biology, and sat in all of them with a rather
pathetically intent look in his eyes, as if waiting for something the
lecturer would never quite come to. Sometimes Amory would see him squirm
in his seat; and his face would light up; he was on fire to debate a
point.
He grew more abstracted on the street and was even accused of becoming
a snob, but Amory knew it was nothing of the sort, and once when Burne
passed him four feet off, absolutely unseeingly, his mind a thousand
miles away, Amory almost choked with the romantic joy of watching him.
Burne seemed to be climbing heights where others would be forever unable
to get a foothold.
"I tell you," Amory declared to Tom, "he's the first contemporary I've
ever met whom I'll admit is my superior in mental capacity."
"It's a bad time to admit it--people are beginning to think he's odd."
"He's way over their heads--you know you think so yourself when you
talk to him--Good Lord, Tom, you _used_ to stand out against 'people.'
Success has completely conventionalized you."
Tom grew rather annoyed.
"What's he trying to do--be excessively holy?"
"No! not like anybody you've ever seen. Never enters the Philadelphian
Society. He has no faith in that rot. He doesn't believe that public
swimming-pools and a kind word in time will right the wrongs of the
world; moreover, he takes a drink whenever he feels like it."
"He certainly is getting in wrong."
"Have you talked to him lately?"
"No."
"Then you haven't any conception of him."
The argument ended nowhere, but Amory noticed more than ever how the
sentiment toward Burne had changed on the campus.
"It's odd," Amory said to Tom one night when they had grown more
amicable on the subject, "that the people who violently disapprove of
Burne's radicalism are distinctly the Pharisee class--I mean they're the
best-educated men in college--the editors of the papers, like yourself
and Ferrenby, the younger professors.... The illiterate athletes like
Langueduc think he's getting eccentric, but they just say, 'Good old
Burne has got some queer ideas in his head,' and pass on--the Pharisee
class--Gee! they ridicule him unmercifully."
The next morning he met Burne hurrying along McCosh walk after a
recitation.
"Whither bound, Tsar?"
"Over to the Prince office to see Ferrenby," he waved a copy of the
morning's Princetonian at Amory. "He wrote this editorial."
"Going to flay him alive?"
"No--but he's got me all balled up. Either I've misjudged him or he's
suddenly become the world's worst radical."
Burne hurried on, and it was several days before Amory heard an account
of the ensuing conversation. Burne had come into the editor's sanctum
displaying the paper cheerfully.
"Hello, Jesse."
"Hello there, Savonarola."
"I just read your editorial."
"Good boy--didn't know you stooped that low."
"Jesse, you startled me."
"How so?"
"Aren't you afraid the faculty'll get after you if you pull this
irreligious stuff?"
"What?"
"Like this morning."
"What the devil--that editorial was on the coaching system."
"Yes, but that quotation--"
Jesse sat up.
"What quotation?"
"You know: 'He who is not with me is against me.'"
"Well--what about it?"
Jesse was puzzled but not alarmed.
"Well, you say here--let me see." Burne opened the paper and read:
"'_He who is not with me is against me_, as that gentleman said who
was notoriously capable of only coarse distinctions and puerile
generalities.'"
"What of it?" Ferrenby began to look alarmed. "Oliver Cromwell said it,
didn't he? or was it Washington, or one of the saints? Good Lord, I've
forgotten."
Burne roared with laughter.
"Oh, Jesse, oh, good, kind Jesse."
"Who said it, for Pete's sake?"
"Well," said Burne, recovering his voice, "St. Matthew attributes it to
Christ."
"My God!" cried Jesse, and collapsed backward into the waste-basket.
*****
AMORY WRITES A POEM
The weeks tore by. Amory wandered occasionally to New York on the chance
of finding a new shining green auto-bus, that its stick-of-candy
glamour might penetrate his disposition. One day he ventured into a
stock-company revival of a play whose name was faintly familiar. The
curtain rose--he watched casually as a girl entered. A few phrases rang
in his ear and touched a faint chord of memory. Where--? When--?
Then he seemed to hear a voice whispering beside him, a very soft,
vibrant voice: "Oh, I'm such a poor little fool; _do_ tell me when I do
wrong."
The solution came in a flash and he had a quick, glad memory of
Isabelle.
He found a blank space on his programme, and began to scribble rapidly:
"Here in the figured dark I watch once more,
There, with the curtain, roll the years away;
Two years of years--there was an idle day
Of ours, when happy endings didn't bore
Our unfermented souls; I could adore
Your eager face beside me, wide-eyed, gay,
Smiling a repertoire while the poor play
Reached me as a faint ripple reaches shore.
"Yawning and wondering an evening through,
I watch alone... and chatterings, of course,
Spoil the one scene which, somehow, _did_ have charms;
You wept a bit, and I grew sad for you
Right here! Where Mr. X defends divorce
And What's-Her-Name falls fainting in his arms."
*****
STILL CALM
"Ghosts are such dumb things," said Alec, "they're slow-witted. I can
always outguess a ghost."
"How?" asked Tom.
"Well, it depends where. Take a bedroom, for example. If you use _any_
discretion a ghost can never get you in a bedroom."
"Go on, s'pose you think there's maybe a ghost in your bedroom--what
measures do you take on getting home at night?" demanded Amory,
interested.
"Take a stick" answered Alec, with ponderous reverence, "one about the
length of a broom-handle. Now, the first thing to do is to get the room
_cleared_--to do this you rush with your eyes closed into your study
and turn on the lights--next, approaching the closet, carefully run the
stick in the door three or four times. Then, if nothing happens, you can
look in. _Always, always_ run the stick in viciously first--_never_ look
first!"
"Of course, that's the ancient Celtic school," said Tom gravely.
"Yes--but they usually pray first. Anyway, you use this method to clear
the closets and also for behind all doors--"
"And the bed," Amory suggested.
"Oh, Amory, no!" cried Alec in horror. "That isn't the way--the bed
requires different tactics--let the bed alone, as you value your
reason--if there is a ghost in the room and that's only about a third of
the time, it is _almost always_ under the bed."
"Well" Amory began.
Alec waved him into silence.
"Of _course_ you never look. You stand in the middle of the floor and
before he knows what you're going to do make a sudden leap for the
bed--never walk near the bed; to a ghost your ankle is your most
vulnerable part--once in bed, you're safe; he may lie around under the
bed all night, but you're safe as daylight. If you still have doubts
pull the blanket over your head."
"All that's very interesting, Tom."
"Isn't it?" Alec beamed proudly. "All my own, too--the Sir Oliver Lodge
of the new world."
Amory was enjoying college immensely again. The sense of going forward
in a direct, determined line had come back; youth was stirring and
shaking out a few new feathers. He had even stored enough surplus energy
to sally into a new pose.
"What's the idea of all this 'distracted' stuff, Amory?" asked Alec one
day, and then as Amory pretended to be cramped over his book in a daze:
"Oh, don't try to act Burne, the mystic, to me."
Amory looked up innocently.
"What?"
"What?" mimicked Alec. "Are you trying to read yourself into a rhapsody
with--let's see the book."
He snatched it; regarded it derisively.
"Well?" said Amory a little stiffly.
"'The Life of St. Teresa,'" read Alec aloud. "Oh, my gosh!"
"Say, Alec."
"What?"
"Does it bother you?"
"Does what bother me?"
"My acting dazed and all that?"
"Why, no--of course it doesn't _bother_ me."
"Well, then, don't spoil it. If I enjoy going around telling people
guilelessly that I think I'm a genius, let me do it."
"You're getting a reputation for being eccentric," said Alec, laughing,
"if that's what you mean."
Amory finally prevailed, and Alec agreed to accept his face value in the
presence of others if he was allowed rest periods when they were alone;
so Amory "ran it out" at a great rate, bringing the most eccentric
characters to dinner, wild-eyed grad students, preceptors with strange
theories of God and government, to the cynical amazement of the
supercilious Cottage Club.
As February became slashed by sun and moved cheerfully into March,
Amory went several times to spend week-ends with Monsignor; once he
took Burne, with great success, for he took equal pride and delight in
displaying them to each other. Monsignor took him several times to see
Thornton Hancock, and once or twice to the house of a Mrs. Lawrence, a
type of Rome-haunting American whom Amory liked immediately.
Then one day came a letter from Monsignor, which appended an interesting
P. S.:
"Do you know," it ran, "that your third cousin, Clara Page,
widowed six months and very poor, is living in Philadelphia?
I don't think you've ever met her, but I wish, as a favor to me,
you'd go to see her. To my mind, she's rather a remarkable woman,
and just about your age."
Amory sighed and decided to go, as a favor....
*****
CLARA
She was immemorial.... Amory wasn't good enough for Clara, Clara of
ripply golden hair, but then no man was. Her goodness was above the
prosy morals of the husband-seeker, apart from the dull literature of
female virtue.
Sorrow lay lightly around her, and when Amory found her in Philadelphia
he thought her steely blue eyes held only happiness; a latent strength,
a realism, was brought to its fullest development by the facts that
she was compelled to face. She was alone in the world, with two small
children, little money, and, worst of all, a host of friends. He saw
her that winter in Philadelphia entertaining a houseful of men for an
evening, when he knew she had not a servant in the house except the
little colored girl guarding the babies overhead. He saw one of the
greatest libertines in that city, a man who was habitually drunk and
notorious at home and abroad, sitting opposite her for an evening,
discussing _girls' boarding-schools_ with a sort of innocent excitement.
What a twist Clara had to her mind! She could make fascinating and
almost brilliant conversation out of the thinnest air that ever floated
through a drawing-room.
The idea that the girl was poverty-stricken had appealed to Amory's
sense of situation. He arrived in Philadelphia expecting to be told
that 921 Ark Street was in a miserable lane of hovels. He was even
disappointed when it proved to be nothing of the sort. It was an old
house that had been in her husband's family for years. An elderly aunt,
who objected to having it sold, had put ten years' taxes with a
lawyer and pranced off to Honolulu, leaving Clara to struggle with the
heating-problem as best she could. So no wild-haired woman with a hungry
baby at her breast and a sad Amelia-like look greeted him. Instead,
Amory would have thought from his reception that she had not a care in
the world.
A calm virility and a dreamy humor, marked contrasts to her
level-headedness--into these moods she slipped sometimes as a refuge.
She could do the most prosy things (though she was wise enough never
to stultify herself with such "household arts" as _knitting_ and
_embroidery_), yet immediately afterward pick up a book and let her
imagination rove as a formless cloud with the wind. Deepest of all in
her personality was the golden radiance that she diffused around her.
As an open fire in a dark room throws romance and pathos into the quiet
faces at its edge, so she cast her lights and shadows around the rooms
that held her, until she made of her prosy old uncle a man of quaint and
meditative charm, metamorphosed the stray telegraph boy into a Puck-like
creature of delightful originality. At first this quality of hers
somehow irritated Amory. He considered his own uniqueness sufficient,
and it rather embarrassed him when she tried to read new interests into
him for the benefit of what other adorers were present. He felt as if
a polite but insistent stage-manager were attempting to make him give a
new interpretation of a part he had conned for years.
But Clara talking, Clara telling a slender tale of a hatpin and an
inebriated man and herself.... People tried afterward to repeat her
anecdotes but for the life of them they could make them sound like
nothing whatever. They gave her a sort of innocent attention and the
best smiles many of them had smiled for long; there were few tears in
Clara, but people smiled misty-eyed at her.
Very occasionally Amory stayed for little half-hours after the rest of
the court had gone, and they would have bread and jam and tea late in
the afternoon or "maple-sugar lunches," as she called them, at night.
"You _are_ remarkable, aren't you!" Amory was becoming trite from where
he perched in the centre of the dining-room table one six o'clock.
"Not a bit," she answered. She was searching out napkins in the
sideboard. "I'm really most humdrum and commonplace. One of those people
who have no interest in anything but their children."
"Tell that to somebody else," scoffed Amory. "You know you're perfectly
effulgent." He asked her the one thing that he knew might embarrass her.
It was the remark that the first bore made to Adam.
"Tell me about yourself." And she gave the answer that Adam must have
given.
"There's nothing to tell."
But eventually Adam probably told the bore all the things he thought
about at night when the locusts sang in the sandy grass, and he must
have remarked patronizingly how _different_ he was from Eve, forgetting
how different she was from him... at any rate, Clara told Amory much
about herself that evening. She had had a harried life from sixteen on,
and her education had stopped sharply with her leisure. Browsing in her
library, Amory found a tattered gray book out of which fell a yellow
sheet that he impudently opened. It was a poem that she had written
at school about a gray convent wall on a gray day, and a girl with
her cloak blown by the wind sitting atop of it and thinking about the
many-colored world. As a rule such sentiment bored him, but this was
done with so much simplicity and atmosphere, that it brought a picture
of Clara to his mind, of Clara on such a cool, gray day with her keen
blue eyes staring out, trying to see her tragedies come marching over
the gardens outside. He envied that poem. How he would have loved to
have come along and seen her on the wall and talked nonsense or romance
to her, perched above him in the air. He began to be frightfully jealous
of everything about Clara: of her past, of her babies, of the men and
women who flocked to drink deep of her cool kindness and rest their
tired minds as at an absorbing play.
"_Nobody_ seems to bore you," he objected.
"About half the world do," she admitted, "but I think that's a pretty
good average, don't you?" and she turned to find something in Browning
that bore on the subject. She was the only person he ever met who
could look up passages and quotations to show him in the middle of
the conversation, and yet not be irritating to distraction. She did it
constantly, with such a serious enthusiasm that he grew fond of watching
her golden hair bent over a book, brow wrinkled ever so little at
hunting her sentence.
Through early March he took to going to Philadelphia for week-ends.
Almost always there was some one else there and she seemed not anxious
to see him alone, for many occasions presented themselves when a word
from her would have given him another delicious half-hour of adoration.
But he fell gradually in love and began to speculate wildly on marriage.
Though this design flowed through his brain even to his lips, still
he knew afterward that the desire had not been deeply rooted. Once he
dreamt that it had come true and woke up in a cold panic, for in his
dream she had been a silly, flaxen Clara, with the gold gone out of her
hair and platitudes falling insipidly from her changeling tongue. But
she was the first fine woman he ever knew and one of the few good people
who ever interested him. She made her goodness such an asset. Amory
had decided that most good people either dragged theirs after them as a
liability, or else distorted it to artificial geniality, and of course
there were the ever-present prig and Pharisee--(but Amory never included
_them_ as being among the saved).
*****
ST. CECILIA
"Over her gray and velvet dress,
Under her molten, beaten hair,
Color of rose in mock distress
Flushes and fades and makes her fair;
Fills the air from her to him
With light and languor and little sighs,
Just so subtly he scarcely knows...
Laughing lightning, color of rose."
"Do you like me?"
"Of course I do," said Clara seriously.
"Why?"
"Well, we have some qualities in common. Things that are spontaneous in
each of us--or were originally."
"You're implying that I haven't used myself very well?"
Clara hesitated.
"Well, I can't judge. A man, of course, has to go through a lot more,
and I've been sheltered."
"Oh, don't stall, please, Clara," Amory interrupted; "but do talk about
me a little, won't you?"
"Surely, I'd adore to." She didn't smile.
"That's sweet of you. First answer some questions. Am I painfully
conceited?"
"Well--no, you have tremendous vanity, but it'll amuse the people who
notice its preponderance."
"I see."
"You're really humble at heart. You sink to the third hell of depression
when you think you've been slighted. In fact, you haven't much
self-respect."
"Centre of target twice, Clara. How do you do it? You never let me say a
word."
"Of course not--I can never judge a man while he's talking. But I'm not
through; the reason you have so little real self-confidence, even though
you gravely announce to the occasional philistine that you think you're
a genius, is that you've attributed all sorts of atrocious faults to
yourself and are trying to live up to them. For instance, you're always
saying that you are a slave to high-balls."
"But I am, potentially."
"And you say you're a weak character, that you've no will."
"Not a bit of will--I'm a slave to my emotions, to my likes, to my
hatred of boredom, to most of my desires--"
"You are not!" She brought one little fist down onto the other.
"You're a slave, a bound helpless slave to one thing in the world, your
imagination."
"You certainly interest me. If this isn't boring you, go on."
"I notice that when you want to stay over an extra day from college you
go about it in a sure way. You never decide at first while the merits of
going or staying are fairly clear in your mind. You let your imagination
shinny on the side of your desires for a few hours, and then you decide.
Naturally your imagination, after a little freedom, thinks up a million
reasons why you should stay, so your decision when it comes isn't true.
It's biassed."
"Yes," objected Amory, "but isn't it lack of will-power to let my
imagination shinny on the wrong side?"
"My dear boy, there's your big mistake. This has nothing to do with
will-power; that's a crazy, useless word, anyway; you lack judgment--the
judgment to decide at once when you know your imagination will play you
false, given half a chance."
"Well, I'll be darned!" exclaimed Amory in surprise, "that's the last
thing I expected."
Clara didn't gloat. She changed the subject immediately. But she had
started him thinking and he believed she was partly right. He felt like
a factory-owner who after accusing a clerk of dishonesty finds that his
own son, in the office, is changing the books once a week. His poor,
mistreated will that he had been holding up to the scorn of himself and
his friends, stood before him innocent, and his judgment walked off to
prison with the unconfinable imp, imagination, dancing in mocking glee
beside him. Clara's was the only advice he ever asked without dictating
the answer himself--except, perhaps, in his talks with Monsignor Darcy.
How he loved to do any sort of thing with Clara! Shopping with her was a
rare, epicurean dream. In every store where she had ever traded she was
whispered about as the beautiful Mrs. Page.
"I'll bet she won't stay single long."
"Well, don't scream it out. She ain't lookin' for no advice."
"_Ain't_ she beautiful!"
(Enter a floor-walker--silence till he moves forward, smirking.)
"Society person, ain't she?"
"Yeah, but poor now, I guess; so they say."
"Gee! girls, _ain't_ she some kid!"
And Clara beamed on all alike. Amory believed that tradespeople gave her
discounts, sometimes to her knowledge and sometimes without it. He knew
she dressed very well, had always the best of everything in the house,
and was inevitably waited upon by the head floor-walker at the very
least.
Sometimes they would go to church together on Sunday and he would walk
beside her and revel in her cheeks moist from the soft water in the new
air. She was very devout, always had been, and God knows what heights
she attained and what strength she drew down to herself when she knelt
and bent her golden hair into the stained-glass light.
"St. Cecelia," he cried aloud one day, quite involuntarily, and the
people turned and peered, and the priest paused in his sermon and Clara
and Amory turned to fiery red.
That was the last Sunday they had, for he spoiled it all that night. He
couldn't help it.
They were walking through the March twilight where it was as warm as
June, and the joy of youth filled his soul so that he felt he must
speak.
"I think," he said and his voice trembled, "that if I lost faith in you
I'd lose faith in God."
She looked at him with such a startled face that he asked her the
matter.
"Nothing," she said slowly, "only this: five men have said that to me
before, and it frightens me."
"Oh, Clara, is that your fate!"
She did not answer.
"I suppose love to you is--" he began.
She turned like a flash.
"I have never been in love."
They walked along, and he realized slowly how much she had told him...
never in love.... She seemed suddenly a daughter of light alone. His
entity dropped out of her plane and he longed only to touch her dress
with almost the realization that Joseph must have had of Mary's eternal
significance. But quite mechanically he heard himself saying:
"And I love you--any latent greatness that I've got is... oh, I can't
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