CHAPTER 2. Spires and Gargoyles 2 page

into a discussion of poetry, in the course of which they introduced

themselves, and Amory's companion proved to be none other than "that

awful highbrow, Thomas Parke D'Invilliers," who signed the passionate

love-poems in the Lit. He was, perhaps, nineteen, with stooped

shoulders, pale blue eyes, and, as Amory could tell from his general

appearance, without much conception of social competition and such

phenomena of absorbing interest. Still, he liked books, and it seemed

forever since Amory had met any one who did; if only that St. Paul's

crowd at the next table would not mistake _him_ for a bird, too, he

would enjoy the encounter tremendously. They didn't seem to be noticing,

so he let himself go, discussed books by the dozens--books he had read,

read about, books he had never heard of, rattling off lists of titles

with the facility of a Brentano's clerk. D'Invilliers was partially

taken in and wholly delighted. In a good-natured way he had almost

decided that Princeton was one part deadly Philistines and one part

deadly grinds, and to find a person who could mention Keats without

stammering, yet evidently washed his hands, was rather a treat.

"Ever read any Oscar Wilde?" he asked.

"No. Who wrote it?"

"It's a man--don't you know?"

"Oh, surely." A faint chord was struck in Amory's memory. "Wasn't the

comic opera, 'Patience,' written about him?"

"Yes, that's the fella. I've just finished a book of his, 'The Picture

of Dorian Gray,' and I certainly wish you'd read it. You'd like it. You

can borrow it if you want to."

"Why, I'd like it a lot--thanks."

"Don't you want to come up to the room? I've got a few other books."

Amory hesitated, glanced at the St. Paul's group--one of them was the

magnificent, exquisite Humbird--and he considered how determinate the

addition of this friend would be. He never got to the stage of making

them and getting rid of them--he was not hard enough for that--so he

measured Thomas Parke D'Invilliers' undoubted attractions and value

against the menace of cold eyes behind tortoise-rimmed spectacles that

he fancied glared from the next table.

"Yes, I'll go."

So he found "Dorian Gray" and the "Mystic and Somber Dolores" and the

"Belle Dame sans Merci"; for a month was keen on naught else. The world

became pale and interesting, and he tried hard to look at Princeton

through the satiated eyes of Oscar Wilde and Swinburne--or "Fingal

O'Flaherty" and "Algernon Charles," as he called them in precieuse jest.

He read enormously every night--Shaw, Chesterton, Barrie, Pinero, Yeats,

Synge, Ernest Dowson, Arthur Symons, Keats, Sudermann, Robert Hugh

Benson, the Savoy Operas--just a heterogeneous mixture, for he suddenly

discovered that he had read nothing for years.

Tom D'Invilliers became at first an occasion rather than a friend. Amory

saw him about once a week, and together they gilded the ceiling of

Tom's room and decorated the walls with imitation tapestry, bought at

an auction, tall candlesticks and figured curtains. Amory liked him for

being clever and literary without effeminacy or affectation. In fact,

Amory did most of the strutting and tried painfully to make every remark

an epigram, than which, if one is content with ostensible epigrams,

there are many feats harder. 12 Univee was amused. Kerry read "Dorian

Gray" and simulated Lord Henry, following Amory about, addressing him

as "Dorian" and pretending to encourage in him wicked fancies and

attenuated tendencies to ennui. When he carried it into Commons, to the

amazement of the others at table, Amory became furiously embarrassed,

and after that made epigrams only before D'Invilliers or a convenient

mirror.

One day Tom and Amory tried reciting their own and Lord Dunsany's poems

to the music of Kerry's graphophone.

"Chant!" cried Tom. "Don't recite! Chant!"

Amory, who was performing, looked annoyed, and claimed that he needed

a record with less piano in it. Kerry thereupon rolled on the floor in

stifled laughter.

"Put on 'Hearts and Flowers'!" he howled. "Oh, my Lord, I'm going to

cast a kitten."

"Shut off the damn graphophone," Amory cried, rather red in the face.

"I'm not giving an exhibition."

In the meanwhile Amory delicately kept trying to awaken a sense of the

social system in D'Invilliers, for he knew that this poet was really

more conventional than he, and needed merely watered hair, a smaller

range of conversation, and a darker brown hat to become quite regular.

But the liturgy of Livingstone collars and dark ties fell on heedless

ears; in fact D'Invilliers faintly resented his efforts; so Amory

confined himself to calls once a week, and brought him occasionally to

12 Univee. This caused mild titters among the other freshmen, who called

them "Doctor Johnson and Boswell."

Alec Connage, another frequent visitor, liked him in a vague way, but

was afraid of him as a highbrow. Kerry, who saw through his poetic

patter to the solid, almost respectable depths within, was immensely

amused and would have him recite poetry by the hour, while he lay with

closed eyes on Amory's sofa and listened:

"Asleep or waking is it? for her neck

Kissed over close, wears yet a purple speck

Wherein the pained blood falters and goes out;

Soft and stung softly--fairer for a fleck..."

"That's good," Kerry would say softly. "It pleases the elder Holiday.

That's a great poet, I guess." Tom, delighted at an audience, would

ramble through the "Poems and Ballades" until Kerry and Amory knew them

almost as well as he.

Amory took to writing poetry on spring afternoons, in the gardens of the

big estates near Princeton, while swans made effective atmosphere in the

artificial pools, and slow clouds sailed harmoniously above the willows.

May came too soon, and suddenly unable to bear walls, he wandered the

campus at all hours through starlight and rain.

*****

A DAMP SYMBOLIC INTERLUDE

The night mist fell. From the moon it rolled, clustered about the spires

and towers, and then settled below them, so that the dreaming peaks were

still in lofty aspiration toward the sky. Figures that dotted the

day like ants now brushed along as shadowy ghosts, in and out of

the foreground. The Gothic halls and cloisters were infinitely more

mysterious as they loomed suddenly out of the darkness, outlined each by

myriad faint squares of yellow light. Indefinitely from somewhere a bell

boomed the quarter-hour, and Amory, pausing by the sun-dial, stretched

himself out full length on the damp grass. The cool bathed his eyes and

slowed the flight of time--time that had crept so insidiously through

the lazy April afternoons, seemed so intangible in the long spring

twilights. Evening after evening the senior singing had drifted over the

campus in melancholy beauty, and through the shell of his undergraduate

consciousness had broken a deep and reverent devotion to the gray walls

and Gothic peaks and all they symbolized as warehouses of dead ages.

The tower that in view of his window sprang upward, grew into a spire,

yearning higher until its uppermost tip was half invisible against

the morning skies, gave him the first sense of the transiency and

unimportance of the campus figures except as holders of the apostolic

succession. He liked knowing that Gothic architecture, with its upward

trend, was peculiarly appropriate to universities, and the idea became

personal to him. The silent stretches of green, the quiet halls with

an occasional late-burning scholastic light held his imagination in

a strong grasp, and the chastity of the spire became a symbol of this

perception.

"Damn it all," he whispered aloud, wetting his hands in the damp and

running them through his hair. "Next year I work!" Yet he knew that

where now the spirit of spires and towers made him dreamily acquiescent,

it would then overawe him. Where now he realized only his own

inconsequence, effort would make him aware of his own impotency and

insufficiency.

The college dreamed on--awake. He felt a nervous excitement that might

have been the very throb of its slow heart. It was a stream where he was

to throw a stone whose faint ripple would be vanishing almost as it left

his hand. As yet he had given nothing, he had taken nothing.

A belated freshman, his oilskin slicker rasping loudly, slushed along

the soft path. A voice from somewhere called the inevitable formula,

"Stick out your head!" below an unseen window. A hundred little sounds

of the current drifting on under the fog pressed in finally on his

consciousness.

"Oh, God!" he cried suddenly, and started at the sound of his voice

in the stillness. The rain dripped on. A minute longer he lay without

moving, his hands clinched. Then he sprang to his feet and gave his

clothes a tentative pat.

"I'm very damn wet!" he said aloud to the sun-dial.

*****

HISTORICAL

The war began in the summer following his freshman year. Beyond a

sporting interest in the German dash for Paris the whole affair failed

either to thrill or interest him. With the attitude he might have held

toward an amusing melodrama he hoped it would be long and bloody. If it

had not continued he would have felt like an irate ticket-holder at a

prize-fight where the principals refused to mix it up.

That was his total reaction.

*****

"HA-HA HORTENSE!"

"All right, ponies!"

"Shake it up!"

"Hey, ponies--how about easing up on that crap game and shaking a mean

hip?"

"Hey, _ponies!_"

The coach fumed helplessly, the Triangle Club president, glowering

with anxiety, varied between furious bursts of authority and fits of

temperamental lassitude, when he sat spiritless and wondered how the

devil the show was ever going on tour by Christmas.

"All right. We'll take the pirate song."

The ponies took last drags at their cigarettes and slumped into place;

the leading lady rushed into the foreground, setting his hands and feet

in an atmospheric mince; and as the coach clapped and stamped and tumped

and da-da'd, they hashed out a dance.

A great, seething ant-hill was the Triangle Club. It gave a musical

comedy every year, travelling with cast, chorus, orchestra, and scenery

all through Christmas vacation. The play and music were the work

of undergraduates, and the club itself was the most influential of

institutions, over three hundred men competing for it every year.

Amory, after an easy victory in the first sophomore Princetonian

competition, stepped into a vacancy of the cast as Boiling Oil, a Pirate

Lieutenant. Every night for the last week they had rehearsed "Ha-Ha

Hortense!" in the Casino, from two in the afternoon until eight in the

morning, sustained by dark and powerful coffee, and sleeping in

lectures through the interim. A rare scene, the Casino. A big, barnlike

auditorium, dotted with boys as girls, boys as pirates, boys as babies;

the scenery in course of being violently set up; the spotlight man

rehearsing by throwing weird shafts into angry eyes; over all the

constant tuning of the orchestra or the cheerful tumpty-tump of a

Triangle tune. The boy who writes the lyrics stands in the corner,

biting a pencil, with twenty minutes to think of an encore; the business

manager argues with the secretary as to how much money can be spent

on "those damn milkmaid costumes"; the old graduate, president in

ninety-eight, perches on a box and thinks how much simpler it was in his

day.

How a Triangle show ever got off was a mystery, but it was a riotous

mystery, anyway, whether or not one did enough service to wear a little

gold Triangle on his watch-chain. "Ha-Ha Hortense!" was written over

six times and had the names of nine collaborators on the programme. All

Triangle shows started by being "something different--not just a regular

musical comedy," but when the several authors, the president, the coach

and the faculty committee finished with it, there remained just the old

reliable Triangle show with the old reliable jokes and the star comedian

who got expelled or sick or something just before the trip, and the

dark-whiskered man in the pony-ballet, who "absolutely won't shave twice

a day, doggone it!"

There was one brilliant place in "Ha-Ha Hortense!" It is a Princeton

tradition that whenever a Yale man who is a member of the widely

advertised "Skull and Bones" hears the sacred name mentioned, he must

leave the room. It is also a tradition that the members are invariably

successful in later life, amassing fortunes or votes or coupons or

whatever they choose to amass. Therefore, at each performance of "Ha-Ha

Hortense!" half-a-dozen seats were kept from sale and occupied by six

of the worst-looking vagabonds that could be hired from the streets,

further touched up by the Triangle make-up man. At the moment in the

show where Firebrand, the Pirate Chief, pointed at his black flag and

said, "I am a Yale graduate--note my Skull and Bones!"--at this very

moment the six vagabonds were instructed to rise _conspicuously_ and

leave the theatre with looks of deep melancholy and an injured dignity.

It was claimed though never proved that on one occasion the hired Elis

were swelled by one of the real thing.

They played through vacation to the fashionable of eight cities. Amory

liked Louisville and Memphis best: these knew how to meet strangers,

furnished extraordinary punch, and flaunted an astonishing array

of feminine beauty. Chicago he approved for a certain verve that

transcended its loud accent--however, it was a Yale town, and as the

Yale Glee Club was expected in a week the Triangle received only divided

homage. In Baltimore, Princeton was at home, and every one fell in love.

There was a proper consumption of strong waters all along the line; one

man invariably went on the stage highly stimulated, claiming that his

particular interpretation of the part required it. There were three

private cars; however, no one slept except in the third car, which

was called the "animal car," and where were herded the spectacled

wind-jammers of the orchestra. Everything was so hurried that there

was no time to be bored, but when they arrived in Philadelphia, with

vacation nearly over, there was rest in getting out of the heavy

atmosphere of flowers and grease-paint, and the ponies took off their

corsets with abdominal pains and sighs of relief.

When the disbanding came, Amory set out post haste for Minneapolis, for

Sally Weatherby's cousin, Isabelle Borge, was coming to spend the winter

in Minneapolis while her parents went abroad. He remembered Isabelle

only as a little girl with whom he had played sometimes when he first

went to Minneapolis. She had gone to Baltimore to live--but since then

she had developed a past.

Amory was in full stride, confident, nervous, and jubilant. Scurrying

back to Minneapolis to see a girl he had known as a child seemed the

interesting and romantic thing to do, so without compunction he wired

his mother not to expect him... sat in the train, and thought about

himself for thirty-six hours.

*****

"PETTING"

On the Triangle trip Amory had come into constant contact with that

great current American phenomenon, the "petting party."

None of the Victorian mothers--and most of the mothers were

Victorian--had any idea how casually their daughters were accustomed to

be kissed. "Servant-girls are that way," says Mrs. Huston-Carmelite to

her popular daughter. "They are kissed first and proposed to afterward."

But the Popular Daughter becomes engaged every six months between

sixteen and twenty-two, when she arranges a match with young Hambell, of

Cambell & Hambell, who fatuously considers himself her first love, and

between engagements the P. D. (she is selected by the cut-in system at

dances, which favors the survival of the fittest) has other sentimental

last kisses in the moonlight, or the firelight, or the outer darkness.

Amory saw girls doing things that even in his memory would have been

impossible: eating three-o'clock, after-dance suppers in impossible

cafes, talking of every side of life with an air half of earnestness,

half of mockery, yet with a furtive excitement that Amory considered

stood for a real moral let-down. But he never realized how wide-spread

it was until he saw the cities between New York and Chicago as one vast

juvenile intrigue.

Afternoon at the Plaza, with winter twilight hovering outside and faint

drums down-stairs... they strut and fret in the lobby, taking another

cocktail, scrupulously attired and waiting. Then the swinging doors

revolve and three bundles of fur mince in. The theatre comes afterward;

then a table at the Midnight Frolic--of course, mother will be along

there, but she will serve only to make things more secretive and

brilliant as she sits in solitary state at the deserted table and thinks

such entertainments as this are not half so bad as they are painted,

only rather wearying. But the P. D. is in love again... it was odd,

wasn't it?--that though there was so much room left in the taxi the P.

D. and the boy from Williams were somehow crowded out and had to go in a

separate car. Odd! Didn't you notice how flushed the P. D. was when she

arrived just seven minutes late? But the P. D. "gets away with it."

The "belle" had become the "flirt," the "flirt" had become the "baby

vamp." The "belle" had five or six callers every afternoon. If the P.

D., by some strange accident, has two, it is made pretty uncomfortable

for the one who hasn't a date with her. The "belle" was surrounded by

a dozen men in the intermissions between dances. Try to find the P. D.

between dances, just _try_ to find her.

The same girl... deep in an atmosphere of jungle music and the

questioning of moral codes. Amory found it rather fascinating to feel

that any popular girl he met before eight he might quite possibly kiss

before twelve.

"Why on earth are we here?" he asked the girl with the green combs one

night as they sat in some one's limousine, outside the Country Club in

Louisville.

"I don't know. I'm just full of the devil."

"Let's be frank--we'll never see each other again. I wanted to come out

here with you because I thought you were the best-looking girl in sight.

You really don't care whether you ever see me again, do you?"

"No--but is this your line for every girl? What have I done to deserve

it?"

"And you didn't feel tired dancing or want a cigarette or any of the

things you said? You just wanted to be--"

"Oh, let's go in," she interrupted, "if you want to _analyze_. Let's not

_talk_ about it."

When the hand-knit, sleeveless jerseys were stylish, Amory, in a burst

of inspiration, named them "petting shirts." The name travelled from

coast to coast on the lips of parlor-snakes and P. D.'s.

*****

DESCRIPTIVE

Amory was now eighteen years old, just under six feet tall and

exceptionally, but not conventionally, handsome. He had rather a young

face, the ingenuousness of which was marred by the penetrating green

eyes, fringed with long dark eyelashes. He lacked somehow that intense

animal magnetism that so often accompanies beauty in men or women; his

personality seemed rather a mental thing, and it was not in his power

to turn it on and off like a water-faucet. But people never forgot his

face.

*****

ISABELLE

She paused at the top of the staircase. The sensations attributed to

divers on spring-boards, leading ladies on opening nights, and lumpy,

husky young men on the day of the Big Game, crowded through her. She

should have descended to a burst of drums or a discordant blend of

themes from "Thais" and "Carmen." She had never been so curious about

her appearance, she had never been so satisfied with it. She had been

sixteen years old for six months.

"Isabelle!" called her cousin Sally from the doorway of the

dressing-room.

"I'm ready." She caught a slight lump of nervousness in her throat.

"I had to send back to the house for another pair of slippers. It'll be

just a minute."

Isabelle started toward the dressing-room for a last peek in the mirror,

but something decided her to stand there and gaze down the broad stairs

of the Minnehaha Club. They curved tantalizingly, and she could catch

just a glimpse of two pairs of masculine feet in the hall below.

Pump-shod in uniform black, they gave no hint of identity, but she

wondered eagerly if one pair were attached to Amory Blaine. This young

man, not as yet encountered, had nevertheless taken up a considerable

part of her day--the first day of her arrival. Coming up in the machine

from the station, Sally had volunteered, amid a rain of question,

comment, revelation, and exaggeration:

"You remember Amory Blaine, of _course_. Well, he's simply mad to

see you again. He's stayed over a day from college, and he's coming

to-night. He's heard so much about you--says he remembers your eyes."

This had pleased Isabelle. It put them on equal terms, although she

was quite capable of staging her own romances, with or without advance

advertising. But following her happy tremble of anticipation, came a

sinking sensation that made her ask:

"How do you mean he's heard about me? What sort of things?"

Sally smiled. She felt rather in the capacity of a showman with her more

exotic cousin.

"He knows you're--you're considered beautiful and all that"--she

paused--"and I guess he knows you've been kissed."

At this Isabelle's little fist had clinched suddenly under the fur robe.

She was accustomed to be thus followed by her desperate past, and it

never failed to rouse in her the same feeling of resentment; yet--in a

strange town it was an advantageous reputation. She was a "Speed," was

she? Well--let them find out.

Out of the window Isabelle watched the snow glide by in the frosty

morning. It was ever so much colder here than in Baltimore; she had

not remembered; the glass of the side door was iced, the windows

were shirred with snow in the corners. Her mind played still with one

subject. Did _he_ dress like that boy there, who walked calmly down a

bustling business street, in moccasins and winter-carnival costume? How

very _Western!_ Of course he wasn't that way: he went to Princeton, was

a sophomore or something. Really she had no distinct idea of him. An

ancient snap-shot she had preserved in an old kodak book had impressed

her by the big eyes (which he had probably grown up to by now). However,

in the last month, when her winter visit to Sally had been decided on,

he had assumed the proportions of a worthy adversary. Children, most

astute of match-makers, plot their campaigns quickly, and Sally

had played a clever correspondence sonata to Isabelle's excitable

temperament. Isabelle had been for some time capable of very strong, if

very transient emotions....

They drew up at a spreading, white-stone building, set back from the

snowy street. Mrs. Weatherby greeted her warmly and her various younger

cousins were produced from the corners where they skulked politely.

Isabelle met them tactfully. At her best she allied all with whom she

came in contact--except older girls and some women. All the impressions

she made were conscious. The half-dozen girls she renewed acquaintance

with that morning were all rather impressed and as much by her direct

personality as by her reputation. Amory Blaine was an open subject.

Evidently a bit light of love, neither popular nor unpopular--every girl

there seemed to have had an affair with him at some time or other, but

no one volunteered any really useful information. He was going to fall

for her.... Sally had published that information to her young set

and they were retailing it back to Sally as fast as they set eyes on

Isabelle. Isabelle resolved secretly that she would, if necessary,

_force_ herself to like him--she owed it to Sally. Suppose she were

terribly disappointed. Sally had painted him in such glowing colors--he

was good-looking, "sort of distinguished, when he wants to be," had a

line, and was properly inconstant. In fact, he summed up all the romance

that her age and environment led her to desire. She wondered if those

were his dancing-shoes that fox-trotted tentatively around the soft rug

below.

All impressions and, in fact, all ideas were extremely kaleidoscopic to

Isabelle. She had that curious mixture of the social and the artistic

temperaments found often in two classes, society women and actresses.

Her education or, rather, her sophistication, had been absorbed from

the boys who had dangled on her favor; her tact was instinctive, and

her capacity for love-affairs was limited only by the number of the

susceptible within telephone distance. Flirt smiled from her large

black-brown eyes and shone through her intense physical magnetism.

So she waited at the head of the stairs that evening while slippers

were fetched. Just as she was growing impatient, Sally came out of the

dressing-room, beaming with her accustomed good nature and high spirits,

and together they descended to the floor below, while the shifting

Date: 2015-02-16; view: 590