PREPARATORY TO THE GREAT ADVENTURE

The train slowed up with midsummer languor at Lake Geneva, and Amory

caught sight of his mother waiting in her electric on the gravelled

station drive. It was an ancient electric, one of the early types, and

painted gray. The sight of her sitting there, slenderly erect, and

of her face, where beauty and dignity combined, melting to a dreamy

recollected smile, filled him with a sudden great pride of her. As they

kissed coolly and he stepped into the electric, he felt a quick fear

lest he had lost the requisite charm to measure up to her.

"Dear boy--you're _so_ tall... look behind and see if there's anything

coming..."

She looked left and right, she slipped cautiously into a speed of two

miles an hour, beseeching Amory to act as sentinel; and at one busy

crossing she made him get out and run ahead to signal her forward like a

traffic policeman. Beatrice was what might be termed a careful driver.

"You _are_ tall--but you're still very handsome--you've skipped the

awkward age, or is that sixteen; perhaps it's fourteen or fifteen; I can

never remember; but you've skipped it."

"Don't embarrass me," murmured Amory.

"But, my dear boy, what odd clothes! They look as if they were a

_set_--don't they? Is your underwear purple, too?"

Amory grunted impolitely.

"You must go to Brooks' and get some really nice suits. Oh, we'll have a

talk to-night or perhaps to-morrow night. I want to tell you about

your heart--you've probably been neglecting your heart--and you don't

_know_."

Amory thought how superficial was the recent overlay of his own

generation. Aside from a minute shyness, he felt that the old cynical

kinship with his mother had not been one bit broken. Yet for the first

few days he wandered about the gardens and along the shore in a state

of superloneliness, finding a lethargic content in smoking "Bull" at the

garage with one of the chauffeurs.

The sixty acres of the estate were dotted with old and new summer houses

and many fountains and white benches that came suddenly into sight from

foliage-hung hiding-places; there was a great and constantly increasing

family of white cats that prowled the many flower-beds and were

silhouetted suddenly at night against the darkening trees. It was on

one of the shadowy paths that Beatrice at last captured Amory, after Mr.

Blaine had, as usual, retired for the evening to his private library.

After reproving him for avoiding her, she took him for a long

tete-a-tete in the moonlight. He could not reconcile himself to her

beauty, that was mother to his own, the exquisite neck and shoulders,

the grace of a fortunate woman of thirty.

"Amory, dear," she crooned softly, "I had such a strange, weird time

after I left you."

"Did you, Beatrice?"

"When I had my last breakdown"--she spoke of it as a sturdy, gallant

feat.

"The doctors told me"--her voice sang on a confidential note--"that if

any man alive had done the consistent drinking that I have, he would

have been physically _shattered_, my dear, and in his _grave_--long in

his grave."

Amory winced, and wondered how this would have sounded to Froggy Parker.

"Yes," continued Beatrice tragically, "I had dreams--wonderful visions."

She pressed the palms of her hands into her eyes. "I saw bronze rivers

lapping marble shores, and great birds that soared through the air,

parti-colored birds with iridescent plumage. I heard strange music and

the flare of barbaric trumpets--what?"

Amory had snickered.

"What, Amory?"

"I said go on, Beatrice."

"That was all--it merely recurred and recurred--gardens that flaunted

coloring against which this would be quite dull, moons that whirled and

swayed, paler than winter moons, more golden than harvest moons--"

"Are you quite well now, Beatrice?"

"Quite well--as well as I will ever be. I am not understood, Amory. I

know that can't express it to you, Amory, but--I am not understood."

Amory was quite moved. He put his arm around his mother, rubbing his

head gently against her shoulder.

"Poor Beatrice--poor Beatrice."

"Tell me about _you_, Amory. Did you have two _horrible_ years?"

Amory considered lying, and then decided against it.

"No, Beatrice. I enjoyed them. I adapted myself to the bourgeoisie.

I became conventional." He surprised himself by saying that, and he

pictured how Froggy would have gaped.

"Beatrice," he said suddenly, "I want to go away to school. Everybody in

Minneapolis is going to go away to school."

Beatrice showed some alarm.

"But you're only fifteen."

"Yes, but everybody goes away to school at fifteen, and I _want_ to,

Beatrice."

On Beatrice's suggestion the subject was dropped for the rest of the

walk, but a week later she delighted him by saying:

"Amory, I have decided to let you have your way. If you still want to,

you can go to school."

"Yes?"

"To St. Regis's in Connecticut."

Amory felt a quick excitement.

"It's being arranged," continued Beatrice. "It's better that you should

go away. I'd have preferred you to have gone to Eton, and then to Christ

Church, Oxford, but it seems impracticable now--and for the present

we'll let the university question take care of itself."

"What are you going to do, Beatrice?"

"Heaven knows. It seems my fate to fret away my years in this country.

Not for a second do I regret being American--indeed, I think that a

regret typical of very vulgar people, and I feel sure we are the great

coming nation--yet"--and she sighed--"I feel my life should have drowsed

away close to an older, mellower civilization, a land of greens and

autumnal browns--"

Amory did not answer, so his mother continued:

"My regret is that you haven't been abroad, but still, as you are a man,

it's better that you should grow up here under the snarling eagle--is

that the right term?"

Amory agreed that it was. She would not have appreciated the Japanese

invasion.

"When do I go to school?"

"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,

prosperous and well-dressed; Taft and Hotchkiss, which prepared

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, conventional, impressive type, year after year; their

mental stimulus the college entrance exams; their vague purpose set

forth in a hundred circulars as "To impart a Thorough Mental, Moral, and

Physical Training as a Christian Gentleman, to fit the boy for meeting

the problems of his day and generation, and to give a solid foundation

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, 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

overlooking 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. Monsignor 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 Episcopalians. He was intensely ritualistic,

startlingly dramatic, loved the idea of God enough to be a celibate, and

rather liked 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 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 your 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," finished 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 suspected 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-minister 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 confidentially, 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

suggestion, 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 between these two.

Monsignor gave the effect of sunlight 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 with Parnell and Gladstone and

Bismarck--and afterward 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 intellect was

concentrated on matters of popularity, the intricacies 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 confirmed, and his joy of life crystallized to

a thousand ambitions. 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 sounding for Amory's preliminary 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 _am_ sorry--"

"No, you're not. No one person in the world is necessary to you or to

me."

"Well--"

"Good-by."

*****

Date: 2015-02-16; view: 709