CHAPTER 2. Spires and Gargoyles 4 page

had never before been noticed in her life--possibly she was half-witted.

While she accompanied them (Kerry had invited her to supper) she said

nothing which could discountenance such a belief.

"She prefers her native dishes," said Alec gravely to the waiter, "but

any coarse food will do."

All through supper he addressed her in the most respectful language,

while Kerry made idiotic love to her on the other side, and she giggled

and grinned. Amory was content to sit and watch the by-play, thinking

what a light touch Kerry had, and how he could transform the barest

incident into a thing of curve and contour. They all seemed to have

the spirit of it more or less, and it was a relaxation to be with them.

Amory usually liked men individually, yet feared them in crowds unless

the crowd was around him. He wondered how much each one contributed to

the party, for there was somewhat of a spiritual tax levied. Alec and

Kerry were the life of it, but not quite the centre. Somehow the quiet

Humbird, and Sloane, with his impatient superciliousness, were the

centre.

Dick Humbird had, ever since freshman year, seemed to Amory a perfect

type of aristocrat. He was slender but well-built--black curly hair,

straight features, and rather a dark skin. Everything he said sounded

intangibly appropriate. He possessed infinite courage, an averagely good

mind, and a sense of honor with a clear charm and _noblesse oblige_

that varied it from righteousness. He could dissipate without going to

pieces, and even his most bohemian adventures never seemed "running it

out." People dressed like him, tried to talk as he did.... Amory decided

that he probably held the world back, but he wouldn't have changed him.

...

He differed from the healthy type that was essentially middle class--he

never seemed to perspire. Some people couldn't be familiar with a

chauffeur without having it returned; Humbird could have lunched at

Sherry's with a colored man, yet people would have somehow known that

it was all right. He was not a snob, though he knew only half his class.

His friends ranged from the highest to the lowest, but it was impossible

to "cultivate" him. Servants worshipped him, and treated him like a god.

He seemed the eternal example of what the upper class tries to be.

"He's like those pictures in the Illustrated London News of the English

officers who have been killed," Amory had said to Alec. "Well," Alec

had answered, "if you want to know the shocking truth, his father was a

grocery clerk who made a fortune in Tacoma real estate and came to New

York ten years ago."

Amory had felt a curious sinking sensation.

This present type of party was made possible by the surging together of

the class after club elections--as if to make a last desperate attempt

to know itself, to keep together, to fight off the tightening spirit of

the clubs. It was a let-down from the conventional heights they had all

walked so rigidly.

After supper they saw Kaluka to the boardwalk, and then strolled back

along the beach to Asbury. The evening sea was a new sensation, for all

its color and mellow age was gone, and it seemed the bleak waste that

made the Norse sagas sad; Amory thought of Kipling's

"Beaches of Lukanon before the sealers came."

It was still a music, though, infinitely sorrowful.

Ten o'clock found them penniless. They had suppered greatly on their

last eleven cents and, singing, strolled up through the casinos and

lighted arches on the boardwalk, stopping to listen approvingly to all

band concerts. In one place Kerry took up a collection for the French

War Orphans which netted a dollar and twenty cents, and with this they

bought some brandy in case they caught cold in the night. They finished

the day in a moving-picture show and went into solemn systematic roars

of laughter at an ancient comedy, to the startled annoyance of the rest

of the audience. Their entrance was distinctly strategic, for each man

as he entered pointed reproachfully at the one just behind him. Sloane,

bringing up the rear, disclaimed all knowledge and responsibility as

soon as the others were scattered inside; then as the irate ticket-taker

rushed in he followed nonchalantly.

They reassembled later by the Casino and made arrangements for the

night. Kerry wormed permission from the watchman to sleep on the

platform and, having collected a huge pile of rugs from the booths to

serve as mattresses and blankets, they talked until midnight, and then

fell into a dreamless sleep, though Amory tried hard to stay awake and

watch that marvellous moon settle on the sea.

So they progressed for two happy days, up and down the shore by

street-car or machine, or by shoe-leather on the crowded boardwalk;

sometimes eating with the wealthy, more frequently dining frugally

at the expense of an unsuspecting restaurateur. They had their photos

taken, eight poses, in a quick-development store. Kerry insisted on

grouping them as a "varsity" football team, and then as a tough gang

from the East Side, with their coats inside out, and himself sitting

in the middle on a cardboard moon. The photographer probably has them

yet--at least, they never called for them. The weather was perfect, and

again they slept outside, and again Amory fell unwillingly asleep.

Sunday broke stolid and respectable, and even the sea seemed to mumble

and complain, so they returned to Princeton via the Fords of transient

farmers, and broke up with colds in their heads, but otherwise none the

worse for wandering.

Even more than in the year before, Amory neglected his work, not

deliberately but lazily and through a multitude of other interests.

Co-ordinate geometry and the melancholy hexameters of Corneille and

Racine held forth small allurements, and even psychology, which he had

eagerly awaited, proved to be a dull subject full of muscular reactions

and biological phrases rather than the study of personality and

influence. That was a noon class, and it always sent him dozing.

Having found that "subjective and objective, sir," answered most of the

questions, he used the phrase on all occasions, and it became the class

joke when, on a query being levelled at him, he was nudged awake by

Ferrenby or Sloane to gasp it out.

Mostly there were parties--to Orange or the Shore, more rarely to

New York and Philadelphia, though one night they marshalled fourteen

waitresses out of Childs' and took them to ride down Fifth Avenue on top

of an auto bus. They all cut more classes than were allowed, which meant

an additional course the following year, but spring was too rare to

let anything interfere with their colorful ramblings. In May Amory was

elected to the Sophomore Prom Committee, and when after a long

evening's discussion with Alec they made out a tentative list of class

probabilities for the senior council, they placed themselves among the

surest. The senior council was composed presumably of the eighteen most

representative seniors, and in view of Alec's football managership and

Amory's chance of nosing out Burne Holiday as Princetonian chairman,

they seemed fairly justified in this presumption. Oddly enough, they

both placed D'Invilliers as among the possibilities, a guess that a year

before the class would have gaped at.

All through the spring Amory had kept up an intermittent correspondence

with Isabelle Borge, punctuated by violent squabbles and chiefly

enlivened by his attempts to find new words for love. He discovered

Isabelle to be discreetly and aggravatingly unsentimental in letters,

but he hoped against hope that she would prove not too exotic a bloom

to fit the large spaces of spring as she had fitted the den in the

Minnehaha Club. During May he wrote thirty-page documents almost

nightly, and sent them to her in bulky envelopes exteriorly labelled

"Part I" and "Part II."

"Oh, Alec, I believe I'm tired of college," he said sadly, as they

walked the dusk together.

"I think I am, too, in a way."

"All I'd like would be a little home in the country, some warm country,

and a wife, and just enough to do to keep from rotting."

"Me, too."

"I'd like to quit."

"What does your girl say?"

"Oh!" Amory gasped in horror. "She wouldn't _think_ of marrying... that

is, not now. I mean the future, you know."

"My girl would. I'm engaged."

"Are you really?"

"Yes. Don't say a word to anybody, please, but I am. I may not come back

next year."

"But you're only twenty! Give up college?"

"Why, Amory, you were saying a minute ago--"

"Yes," Amory interrupted, "but I was just wishing. I wouldn't think of

leaving college. It's just that I feel so sad these wonderful nights. I

sort of feel they're never coming again, and I'm not really getting all

I could out of them. I wish my girl lived here. But marry--not a chance.

Especially as father says the money isn't forthcoming as it used to be."

"What a waste these nights are!" agreed Alec.

But Amory sighed and made use of the nights. He had a snap-shot of

Isabelle, enshrined in an old watch, and at eight almost every night he

would turn off all the lights except the desk lamp and, sitting by the

open windows with the picture before him, write her rapturous letters.

... Oh it's so hard to write you what I really _feel_ when I

think about you so much; you've gotten to mean to me a _dream_ that

I can't put on paper any more. Your last letter came and it was

wonderful! I read it over about six times, especially the last

part, but I do wish, sometimes, you'd be more _frank_ and tell me

what you really do think of me, yet your last letter was too good

to be true, and I can hardly wait until June! Be sure and be able

to come to the prom. It'll be fine, I think, and I want to bring

_you_ just at the end of a wonderful year. I often think over what

you said on that night and wonder how much you meant. If it were

anyone but you--but you see I _thought_ you were fickle the first

time I saw you and you are so popular and everthing that I can't

imagine you really liking me _best_.

Oh, Isabelle, dear--it's a wonderful night. Somebody is playing

"Love Moon" on a mandolin far across the campus, and the music

seems to bring you into the window. Now he's playing "Good-by,

Boys, I'm Through," and how well it suits me. For I am through

with everything. I have decided never to take a cocktail again,

and I know I'll never again fall in love--I couldn't--you've been

too much a part of my days and nights to ever let me think of

another girl. I meet them all the time and they don't interest me.

I'm not pretending to be blasй, because it's not that. It's just

that I'm in love. Oh, _dearest_ Isabelle (somehow I can't call you

just Isabelle, and I'm afraid I'll come out with the "dearest"

before your family this June), you've got to come to the prom,

and then I'll come up to your house for a day and everything'll be

perfect....

And so on in an eternal monotone that seemed to both of them infinitely

charming, infinitely new.

*****

June came and the days grew so hot and lazy that they could not worry

even about exams, but spent dreamy evenings on the court of Cottage,

talking of long subjects until the sweep of country toward Stony Brook

became a blue haze and the lilacs were white around tennis-courts, and

words gave way to silent cigarettes.... Then down deserted Prospect and

along McCosh with song everywhere around them, up to the hot joviality

of Nassau Street.

Tom D'Invilliers and Amory walked late in those days. A gambling fever

swept through the sophomore class and they bent over the bones till

three o'clock many a sultry night. After one session they came out of

Sloane's room to find the dew fallen and the stars old in the sky.

"Let's borrow bicycles and take a ride," Amory suggested.

"All right. I'm not a bit tired and this is almost the last night of the

year, really, because the prom stuff starts Monday."

They found two unlocked bicycles in Holder Court and rode out about

half-past three along the Lawrenceville Road.

"What are you going to do this summer, Amory?"

"Don't ask me--same old things, I suppose. A month or two in Lake

Geneva--I'm counting on you to be there in July, you know--then there'll

be Minneapolis, and that means hundreds of summer hops, parlor-snaking,

getting bored--But oh, Tom," he added suddenly, "hasn't this year been

slick!"

"No," declared Tom emphatically, a new Tom, clothed by Brooks, shod

by Franks, "I've won this game, but I feel as if I never want to play

another. You're all right--you're a rubber ball, and somehow it suits

you, but I'm sick of adapting myself to the local snobbishness of this

corner of the world. I want to go where people aren't barred because of

the color of their neckties and the roll of their coats."

"You can't, Tom," argued Amory, as they rolled along through the

scattering night; "wherever you go now you'll always unconsciously apply

these standards of 'having it' or 'lacking it.' For better or worse

we've stamped you; you're a Princeton type!"

"Well, then," complained Tom, his cracked voice rising plaintively, "why

do I have to come back at all? I've learned all that Princeton has to

offer. Two years more of mere pedantry and lying around a club aren't

going to help. They're just going to disorganize me, conventionalize me

completely. Even now I'm so spineless that I wonder how I get away with

it."

"Oh, but you're missing the real point, Tom," Amory interrupted. "You've

just had your eyes opened to the snobbishness of the world in a rather

abrupt manner. Princeton invariably gives the thoughtful man a social

sense."

"You consider you taught me that, don't you?" he asked quizzically,

eying Amory in the half dark.

Amory laughed quietly.

"Didn't I?"

"Sometimes," he said slowly, "I think you're my bad angel. I might have

been a pretty fair poet."

"Come on, that's rather hard. You chose to come to an Eastern college.

Either your eyes were opened to the mean scrambling quality of people,

or you'd have gone through blind, and you'd hate to have done that--been

like Marty Kaye."

"Yes," he agreed, "you're right. I wouldn't have liked it. Still, it's

hard to be made a cynic at twenty."

"I was born one," Amory murmured. "I'm a cynical idealist." He paused

and wondered if that meant anything.

They reached the sleeping school of Lawrenceville, and turned to ride

back.

"It's good, this ride, isn't it?" Tom said presently.

"Yes; it's a good finish, it's knock-out; everything's good to-night.

Oh, for a hot, languorous summer and Isabelle!"

"Oh, you and your Isabelle! I'll bet she's a simple one... let's say

some poetry."

So Amory declaimed "The Ode to a Nightingale" to the bushes they passed.

"I'll never be a poet," said Amory as he finished. "I'm not enough of a

sensualist really; there are only a few obvious things that I notice as

primarily beautiful: women, spring evenings, music at night, the sea;

I don't catch the subtle things like 'silver-snarling trumpets.' I may

turn out an intellectual, but I'll never write anything but mediocre

poetry."

They rode into Princeton as the sun was making colored maps of the sky

behind the graduate school, and hurried to the refreshment of a shower

that would have to serve in place of sleep. By noon the bright-costumed

alumni crowded the streets with their bands and choruses, and in the

tents there was great reunion under the orange-and-black banners that

curled and strained in the wind. Amory looked long at one house which

bore the legend "Sixty-nine." There a few gray-haired men sat and talked

quietly while the classes swept by in panorama of life.

*****

UNDER THE ARC-LIGHT

Then tragedy's emerald eyes glared suddenly at Amory over the edge of

June. On the night after his ride to Lawrenceville a crowd sallied to

New York in quest of adventure, and started back to Princeton about

twelve o'clock in two machines. It had been a gay party and different

stages of sobriety were represented. Amory was in the car behind; they

had taken the wrong road and lost the way, and so were hurrying to catch

up.

It was a clear night and the exhilaration of the road went to Amory's

head. He had the ghost of two stanzas of a poem forming in his mind. ...

So the gray car crept nightward in the dark and there was no life

stirred as it went by.... As the still ocean paths before the

shark in starred and glittering waterways, beauty-high, the

moon-swathed trees divided, pair on pair, while flapping

nightbirds cried across the air....

A moment by an inn of lamps and shades, a yellow inn under a

yellow moon--then silence, where crescendo laughter fades... the

car swung out again to the winds of June, mellowed the shadows

where the distance grew, then crushed the yellow shadows into

blue....

They jolted to a stop, and Amory peered up, startled. A woman was

standing beside the road, talking to Alec at the wheel. Afterward

he remembered the harpy effect that her old kimono gave her, and the

cracked hollowness of her voice as she spoke:

"You Princeton boys?"

"Yes."

"Well, there's one of you killed here, and two others about dead."

"_My God!_"

"Look!" She pointed and they gazed in horror. Under the full light of

a roadside arc-light lay a form, face downward in a widening circle of

blood.

They sprang from the car. Amory thought of the back of that head--that

hair--that hair... and then they turned the form over.

"It's Dick--Dick Humbird!"

"Oh, Christ!"

"Feel his heart!"

Then the insistent voice of the old crone in a sort of croaking triumph:

"He's quite dead, all right. The car turned over. Two of the men that

weren't hurt just carried the others in, but this one's no use."

Amory rushed into the house and the rest followed with a limp mass that

they laid on the sofa in the shoddy little front parlor. Sloane, with

his shoulder punctured, was on another lounge. He was half delirious,

and kept calling something about a chemistry lecture at 8:10.

"I don't know what happened," said Ferrenby in a strained voice. "Dick

was driving and he wouldn't give up the wheel; we told him he'd been

drinking too much--then there was this damn curve--oh, my _God!_..." He

threw himself face downward on the floor and broke into dry sobs.

The doctor had arrived, and Amory went over to the couch, where some

one handed him a sheet to put over the body. With a sudden hardness, he

raised one of the hands and let it fall back inertly. The brow was cold

but the face not expressionless. He looked at the shoe-laces--Dick had

tied them that morning. _He_ had tied them--and now he was this heavy

white mass. All that remained of the charm and personality of the Dick

Humbird he had known--oh, it was all so horrible and unaristocratic and

close to the earth. All tragedy has that strain of the grotesque

and squalid--so useless, futile... the way animals die.... Amory was

reminded of a cat that had lain horribly mangled in some alley of his

childhood.

"Some one go to Princeton with Ferrenby."

Amory stepped outside the door and shivered slightly at the late night

wind--a wind that stirred a broken fender on the mass of bent metal to a

plaintive, tinny sound.

*****

CRESCENDO!

Next day, by a merciful chance, passed in a whirl. When Amory was by

himself his thoughts zigzagged inevitably to the picture of that red

mouth yawning incongruously in the white face, but with a determined

effort he piled present excitement upon the memory of it and shut it

coldly away from his mind.

Isabelle and her mother drove into town at four, and they rode up

smiling Prospect Avenue, through the gay crowd, to have tea at Cottage.

The clubs had their annual dinners that night, so at seven he loaned her

to a freshman and arranged to meet her in the gymnasium at eleven, when

the upper classmen were admitted to the freshman dance. She was all he

had expected, and he was happy and eager to make that night the centre

of every dream. At nine the upper classes stood in front of the clubs

as the freshman torchlight parade rioted past, and Amory wondered if the

dress-suited groups against the dark, stately backgrounds and under

the flare of the torches made the night as brilliant to the staring,

cheering freshmen as it had been to him the year before.

The next day was another whirl. They lunched in a gay party of six in a

private dining-room at the club, while Isabelle and Amory looked at each

other tenderly over the fried chicken and knew that their love was to be

eternal. They danced away the prom until five, and the stags cut in on

Isabelle with joyous abandon, which grew more and more enthusiastic as

the hour grew late, and their wines, stored in overcoat pockets in the

coat room, made old weariness wait until another day. The stag line is

a most homogeneous mass of men. It fairly sways with a single soul. A

dark-haired beauty dances by and there is a half-gasping sound as the

ripple surges forward and some one sleeker than the rest darts out and

cuts in. Then when the six-foot girl (brought by Kaye in your class, and

to whom he has been trying to introduce you all evening) gallops by,

the line surges back and the groups face about and become intent on far

corners of the hall, for Kaye, anxious and perspiring, appears elbowing

through the crowd in search of familiar faces.

"I say, old man, I've got an awfully nice--"

"Sorry, Kaye, but I'm set for this one. I've got to cut in on a fella."

"Well, the next one?"

"What--ah--er--I swear I've got to go cut in--look me up when she's got

a dance free."

It delighted Amory when Isabelle suggested that they leave for a while

and drive around in her car. For a delicious hour that passed too soon

they glided the silent roads about Princeton and talked from the surface

of their hearts in shy excitement. Amory felt strangely ingenuous and

made no attempt to kiss her.

Next day they rode up through the Jersey country, had luncheon in New

York, and in the afternoon went to see a problem play at which Isabelle

wept all through the second act, rather to Amory's embarrassment--though

it filled him with tenderness to watch her. He was tempted to lean over

and kiss away her tears, and she slipped her hand into his under cover

of darkness to be pressed softly.

Then at six they arrived at the Borges' summer place on Long Island, and

Amory rushed up-stairs to change into a dinner coat. As he put in his

studs he realized that he was enjoying life as he would probably never

enjoy it again. Everything was hallowed by the haze of his own youth. He

had arrived, abreast of the best in his generation at Princeton. He was

in love and his love was returned. Turning on all the lights, he looked

at himself in the mirror, trying to find in his own face the qualities

that made him see clearer than the great crowd of people, that made him

decide firmly, and able to influence and follow his own will. There was

little in his life now that he would have changed. ... Oxford might have

been a bigger field.

Silently he admired himself. How conveniently well he looked, and how

well a dinner coat became him. He stepped into the hall and then

waited at the top of the stairs, for he heard footsteps coming. It was

Isabelle, and from the top of her shining hair to her little golden

slippers she had never seemed so beautiful.

"Isabelle!" he cried, half involuntarily, and held out his arms. As in

the story-books, she ran into them, and on that half-minute, as their

lips first touched, rested the high point of vanity, the crest of his

young egotism.

CHAPTER 3. The Egotist Considers

"Ouch! Let me go!"

He dropped his arms to his sides.

"What's the matter?"

"Your shirt stud--it hurt me--look!" She was looking down at her neck,

where a little blue spot about the size of a pea marred its pallor.

"Oh, Isabelle," he reproached himself, "I'm a goopher. Really, I'm

sorry--I shouldn't have held you so close."

She looked up impatiently.

"Oh, Amory, of course you couldn't help it, and it didn't hurt much; but

what _are_ we going to do about it?"

"_Do_ about it?" he asked. "Oh--that spot; it'll disappear in a second."

"It isn't," she said, after a moment of concentrated gazing, "it's still

there--and it looks like Old Nick--oh, Amory, what'll we do! It's _just_

the height of your shoulder."

"Massage it," he suggested, repressing the faintest inclination to

laugh.

She rubbed it delicately with the tips of her fingers, and then a tear

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