CHAPTER 2. Spires and Gargoyles 13 page

Artist as a Young Man"; intensely interested by "Joan and Peter" and

"The Undying 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 "Jennie Gerhardt."

Mackenzie, Chesterton, Galsworthy, Bennett, had sunk in his

appreciation from sagacious, life-saturated geniuses to merely diverting

contemporaries. Shaw's aloof clarity and brilliant consistency and the

gloriously intoxicated efforts of H. G. Wells to fit the key of romantic

symmetry 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 repeating it

turned him cold with horror.

In his search for cool people he remembered Mrs. Lawrence, a very

intelligent, very dignified lady, a convert to the church, and a great

devotee of Monsignor's.

He called her on the 'phone one day. Yes, she remembered 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?" asked Amory, interested.

"Oh, he's having a frightful time."

"Why?"

"About the Irish Republic. He thinks it lacks dignity."

"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 depends 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 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

little space. Mrs. Lawrence reminded him vaguely of Beatrice, 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 reincarnation, that your

faith will eventually clarify."

"Perhaps," he assented. "I'm rather pagan at present. It's just that

religion doesn't seem to have the slightest bearing on life at my age."

When he left her house he walked down Riverside Drive with a feeling

of satisfaction. It was amusing to discuss again such subjects as this

young poet, Stephen Vincent Benet, or the Irish Republic. Between

the rancid accusations of Edward Carson and Justice 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 window-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 normality. They had

decided that with economy they could still afford the apartment, which

Tom, with the domesticity 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 candlesticks and the carved Louis XV chair in which no one

could sit more than a minute without acute spinal disorders--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 prohibition the great rendezvous 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

Rose Room--besides even that required several cocktails "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 alarming 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 suggested

that the whole property was simply a white elephant 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, lunched with Mrs. Lawrence, and

then ridden abstractedly 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 am

restless."

"Love and war did for you."

"Well," Amory considered, "I'm not sure that the war itself had any

great effect 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 is too huge and complex. The world

is so overgrown that it can't lift its own fingers, and I was planning

to be such an important finger--"

"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 Trotsky and Lenin take a definite, consistent stand they'll become

merely two-minute figures like Kerensky. Even 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: Guynemer 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 permanent 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, pitifully hard. But we

no sooner get a popular reformer or politician or soldier or writer or

philosopher--a Roosevelt, 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?"

"Absolutely. Look at you; you're on The New Democracy, 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 interesting,

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 addition to our light summer reading.'

Come on now, admit it."

Tom laughed, and Amory continued triumphantly.

"We _want_ to believe. Young students try to believe in older authors,

constituents try to believe in their Congressmen, countries try to

believe in their statesmen, but they _can't_. Too many voices, too much

scattered, 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 thousands of

tired, hurried men, men too involved in the business of modern living to

swallow anything but predigested food. For two cents the voter buys

his politics, prejudices, and philosophy. A year later there is a new

political ring or a change in the paper's ownership, consequence: more

confusion, more contradiction, a sudden inrush of new ideas, their

tempering, their distillation, the reaction against them--"

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 vulgar 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'll 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.

"Anyway," 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."

"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 another 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 beginning 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, Gouverneur Morris, Fanny Hurst, Mary Roberts

Rinehart--not producing among 'em one story or novel that will last ten

years. This man Cobb--I don't tink 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

American life, but his style and perspective are barbarous. 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 of

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 have some

cultural background, some intelligence 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, Bennett, 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,

Richard Glaenzer,

Scharmel Iris,

Conrad Aiken,

I place your names here

So that you may live

If only as names,

Sinuous, mauve-colored names,

In the Juvenalia

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 enjoyed 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 look 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-watch. "I'll buy you

a grea' big dinner on the strength of the Juvenalia of your collected

editions."

*****

LOOKING BACKWARD

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 life. One night while the heat, overpowering and enervating, poured

into the windows of his room he struggled for several hours in a vague

effort 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 machine, in an hour of thaw and stars.

Strange damps--full of the eyes of many men, crowded with life

borne in upon a lull.... Oh, I was young, for I could turn

again to you, most finite and most beautiful, and taste the stuff

of half-remembered dreams, sweet and new on your mouth.

... There was a tanging in the midnight air--silence was 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.

*****

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 you

have lost all the feeling of romance that you had before the war. You

make a great mistake if you think you can be romantic without religion.

Sometimes 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 another 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 easily have been

the end of a brilliant family. But in regard to matrimony, 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.

Within a week after the receipt of this letter their little household

fell precipitously to pieces. The immediate 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 yielded to an impulse 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, remembered uncle, Amory journeyed up through the luxuriant

fields of Maryland into Ramilly County. But instead of two days his stay

lasted from mid-August nearly through September, for in Maryland he met

Eleanor.

CHAPTER 3. Young Irony

For 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? Afterward 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 himself 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,

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...

If gray shapes drift beneath the foam

We shall not see."

They quarrelled dangerously because Amory maintained that _sea_ and

_see_ couldn't possibly be used as a rhyme. 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 lived 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 congratulating Poe for drinking himself to death in

that atmosphere of smiling complacency. One afternoon he had strolled

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