CHAPTER 2. Spires and Gargoyles 5 page

gathered in the corner of her eye, and slid down her cheek.

"Oh, Amory," she said despairingly, lifting up a most pathetic face,

"I'll just make my whole neck _flame_ if I rub it. What'll I do?"

A quotation sailed into his head and he couldn't resist repeating it

aloud.

"All the perfumes of Arabia will not whiten this little hand."

She looked up and the sparkle of the tear in her eye was like ice.

"You're not very sympathetic."

Amory mistook her meaning.

"Isabelle, darling, I think it'll--"

"Don't touch me!" she cried. "Haven't I enough on my mind and you stand

there and _laugh!_"

Then he slipped again.

"Well, it _is_ funny, Isabelle, and we were talking the other day about

a sense of humor being--"

She was looking at him with something that was not a smile, rather the

faint, mirthless echo of a smile, in the corners of her mouth.

"Oh, shut up!" she cried suddenly, and fled down the hallway toward her

room. Amory stood there, covered with remorseful confusion.

"Damn!"

When Isabelle reappeared she had thrown a light wrap about her

shoulders, and they descended the stairs in a silence that endured

through dinner.

"Isabelle," he began rather testily, as they arranged themselves in the

car, bound for a dance at the Greenwich Country Club, "you're angry, and

I'll be, too, in a minute. Let's kiss and make up."

Isabelle considered glumly.

"I hate to be laughed at," she said finally.

"I won't laugh any more. I'm not laughing now, am I?"

"You did."

"Oh, don't be so darned feminine."

Her lips curled slightly.

"I'll be anything I want."

Amory kept his temper with difficulty. He became aware that he had not

an ounce of real affection for Isabelle, but her coldness piqued him. He

wanted to kiss her, kiss her a lot, because then he knew he could leave

in the morning and not care. On the contrary, if he didn't kiss her, it

would worry him.... It would interfere vaguely with his idea of himself

as a conqueror. It wasn't dignified to come off second best, _pleading_,

with a doughty warrior like Isabelle.

Perhaps she suspected this. At any rate, Amory watched the night that

should have been the consummation of romance glide by with great moths

overhead and the heavy fragrance of roadside gardens, but without those

broken words, those little sighs....

Afterward they suppered on ginger ale and devil's food in the pantry,

and Amory announced a decision.

"I'm leaving early in the morning."

"Why?"

"Why not?" he countered.

"There's no need."

"However, I'm going."

"Well, if you insist on being ridiculous--"

"Oh, don't put it that way," he objected.

"--just because I won't let you kiss me. Do you think--"

"Now, Isabelle," he interrupted, "you know it's not that--even

suppose it is. We've reached the stage where we either ought to

kiss--or--or--nothing. It isn't as if you were refusing on moral

grounds."

She hesitated.

"I really don't know what to think about you," she began, in a feeble,

perverse attempt at conciliation. "You're so funny."

"How?"

"Well, I thought you had a lot of self-confidence and all that; remember

you told me the other day that you could do anything you wanted, or get

anything you wanted?"

Amory flushed. He _had_ told her a lot of things.

"Yes."

"Well, you didn't seem to feel so self-confident to-night. Maybe you're

just plain conceited."

"No, I'm not," he hesitated. "At Princeton--"

"Oh, you and Princeton! You'd think that was the world, the way you

talk! Perhaps you _can_ write better than anybody else on your old

Princetonian; maybe the freshmen _do_ think you're important--"

"You don't understand--"

"Yes, I do," she interrupted. "I _do_, because you're always talking

about yourself and I used to like it; now I don't."

"Have I to-night?"

"That's just the point," insisted Isabelle. "You got all upset to-night.

You just sat and watched my eyes. Besides, I have to think all the time

I'm talking to you--you're so critical."

"I make you think, do I?" Amory repeated with a touch of vanity.

"You're a nervous strain"--this emphatically--"and when you analyze

every little emotion and instinct I just don't have 'em."

"I know." Amory admitted her point and shook his head helplessly.

"Let's go." She stood up.

He rose abstractedly and they walked to the foot of the stairs.

"What train can I get?"

"There's one about 9:11 if you really must go."

"Yes, I've got to go, really. Good night."

"Good night."

They were at the head of the stairs, and as Amory turned into his room

he thought he caught just the faintest cloud of discontent in her face.

He lay awake in the darkness and wondered how much he cared--how much

of his sudden unhappiness was hurt vanity--whether he was, after all,

temperamentally unfitted for romance.

When he awoke, it was with a glad flood of consciousness. The early wind

stirred the chintz curtains at the windows and he was idly puzzled not

to be in his room at Princeton with his school football picture over

the bureau and the Triangle Club on the wall opposite. Then the

grandfather's clock in the hall outside struck eight, and the memory

of the night before came to him. He was out of bed, dressing, like the

wind; he must get out of the house before he saw Isabelle. What had

seemed a melancholy happening, now seemed a tiresome anticlimax. He was

dressed at half past, so he sat down by the window; felt that the sinews

of his heart were twisted somewhat more than he had thought. What an

ironic mockery the morning seemed!--bright and sunny, and full of the

smell of the garden; hearing Mrs. Borge's voice in the sun-parlor below,

he wondered where was Isabelle.

There was a knock at the door.

"The car will be around at ten minutes of nine, sir."

He returned to his contemplation of the outdoors, and began repeating

over and over, mechanically, a verse from Browning, which he had once

quoted to Isabelle in a letter:

"Each life unfulfilled, you see,

It hangs still, patchy and scrappy;

We have not sighed deep, laughed free,

Starved, feasted, despaired--been happy."

But his life would not be unfulfilled. He took a sombre satisfaction in

thinking that perhaps all along she had been nothing except what he had

read into her; that this was her high point, that no one else would ever

make her think. Yet that was what she had objected to in him; and Amory

was suddenly tired of thinking, thinking!

"Damn her!" he said bitterly, "she's spoiled my year!"

*****

THE SUPERMAN GROWS CARELESS

On a dusty day in September Amory arrived in Princeton and joined the

sweltering crowd of conditioned men who thronged the streets. It seemed

a stupid way to commence his upper-class years, to spend four hours a

morning in the stuffy room of a tutoring school, imbibing the infinite

boredom of conic sections. Mr. Rooney, pander to the dull, conducted the

class and smoked innumerable Pall Malls as he drew diagrams and worked

equations from six in the morning until midnight.

"Now, Langueduc, if I used that formula, where would my A point be?"

Langueduc lazily shifts his six-foot-three of football material and

tries to concentrate.

"Oh--ah--I'm damned if I know, Mr. Rooney."

"Oh, why of course, of course you can't _use_ that formula. _That's_

what I wanted you to say."

"Why, sure, of course."

"Do you see why?"

"You bet--I suppose so."

"If you don't see, tell me. I'm here to show you."

"Well, Mr. Rooney, if you don't mind, I wish you'd go over that again."

"Gladly. Now here's 'A'..."

The room was a study in stupidity--two huge stands for paper, Mr. Rooney

in his shirt-sleeves in front of them, and slouched around on chairs,

a dozen men: Fred Sloane, the pitcher, who absolutely _had_ to get

eligible; "Slim" Langueduc, who would beat Yale this fall, if only he

could master a poor fifty per cent; McDowell, gay young sophomore, who

thought it was quite a sporting thing to be tutoring here with all these

prominent athletes.

"Those poor birds who haven't a cent to tutor, and have to study during

the term are the ones I pity," he announced to Amory one day, with a

flaccid camaraderie in the droop of the cigarette from his pale lips. "I

should think it would be such a bore, there's so much else to do in New

York during the term. I suppose they don't know what they miss, anyhow."

There was such an air of "you and I" about Mr. McDowell that Amory very

nearly pushed him out of the open window when he said this. ... Next

February his mother would wonder why he didn't make a club and increase

his allowance... simple little nut....

Through the smoke and the air of solemn, dense earnestness that filled

the room would come the inevitable helpless cry:

"I don't get it! Repeat that, Mr. Rooney!" Most of them were so stupid

or careless that they wouldn't admit when they didn't understand, and

Amory was of the latter. He found it impossible to study conic sections;

something in their calm and tantalizing respectability breathing

defiantly through Mr. Rooney's fetid parlors distorted their equations

into insoluble anagrams. He made a last night's effort with the

proverbial wet towel, and then blissfully took the exam, wondering

unhappily why all the color and ambition of the spring before had faded

out. Somehow, with the defection of Isabelle the idea of undergraduate

success had loosed its grasp on his imagination, and he contemplated a

possible failure to pass off his condition with equanimity, even though

it would arbitrarily mean his removal from the Princetonian board and

the slaughter of his chances for the Senior Council.

There was always his luck.

He yawned, scribbled his honor pledge on the cover, and sauntered from

the room.

"If you don't pass it," said the newly arrived Alec as they sat on the

window-seat of Amory's room and mused upon a scheme of wall decoration,

"you're the world's worst goopher. Your stock will go down like an

elevator at the club and on the campus."

"Oh, hell, I know it. Why rub it in?"

"'Cause you deserve it. Anybody that'd risk what you were in line for

_ought_ to be ineligible for Princetonian chairman."

"Oh, drop the subject," Amory protested. "Watch and wait and shut up.

I don't want every one at the club asking me about it, as if I were a

prize potato being fattened for a vegetable show." One evening a week

later Amory stopped below his own window on the way to Renwick's, and,

seeing a light, called up:

"Oh, Tom, any mail?"

Alec's head appeared against the yellow square of light.

"Yes, your result's here."

His heart clamored violently.

"What is it, blue or pink?"

"Don't know. Better come up."

He walked into the room and straight over to the table, and then

suddenly noticed that there were other people in the room.

"'Lo, Kerry." He was most polite. "Ah, men of Princeton." They seemed

to be mostly friends, so he picked up the envelope marked "Registrar's

Office," and weighed it nervously.

"We have here quite a slip of paper."

"Open it, Amory."

"Just to be dramatic, I'll let you know that if it's blue, my name is

withdrawn from the editorial board of the Prince, and my short career is

over."

He paused, and then saw for the first time Ferrenby's eyes, wearing a

hungry look and watching him eagerly. Amory returned the gaze pointedly.

"Watch my face, gentlemen, for the primitive emotions."

He tore it open and held the slip up to the light.

"Well?"

"Pink or blue?"

"Say what it is."

"We're all ears, Amory."

"Smile or swear--or something."

There was a pause... a small crowd of seconds swept by... then he looked

again and another crowd went on into time.

"Blue as the sky, gentlemen...."

*****

AFTERMATH

What Amory did that year from early September to late in the spring was

so purposeless and inconsecutive that it seems scarcely worth recording.

He was, of course, immediately sorry for what he had lost. His

philosophy of success had tumbled down upon him, and he looked for the

reasons.

"Your own laziness," said Alec later.

"No--something deeper than that. I've begun to feel that I was meant to

lose this chance."

"They're rather off you at the club, you know; every man that doesn't

come through makes our crowd just so much weaker."

"I hate that point of view."

"Of course, with a little effort you could still stage a comeback."

"No--I'm through--as far as ever being a power in college is concerned."

"But, Amory, honestly, what makes me the angriest isn't the fact that

you won't be chairman of the Prince and on the Senior Council, but just

that you didn't get down and pass that exam."

"Not me," said Amory slowly; "I'm mad at the concrete thing. My own

idleness was quite in accord with my system, but the luck broke."

"Your system broke, you mean."

"Maybe."

"Well, what are you going to do? Get a better one quick, or just bum

around for two more years as a has-been?"

"I don't know yet..."

"Oh, Amory, buck up!"

"Maybe."

Amory's point of view, though dangerous, was not far from the true one.

If his reactions to his environment could be tabulated, the chart would

have appeared like this, beginning with his earliest years:

1. The fundamental Amory.

2. Amory plus Beatrice.

3. Amory plus Beatrice plus Minneapolis.

Then St. Regis' had pulled him to pieces and started him over again:

4. Amory plus St. Regis'.

5. Amory plus St. Regis' plus Princeton.

That had been his nearest approach to success through conformity. The

fundamental Amory, idle, imaginative, rebellious, had been nearly snowed

under. He had conformed, he had succeeded, but as his imagination was

neither satisfied nor grasped by his own success, he had listlessly,

half-accidentally chucked the whole thing and become again:

6. The fundamental Amory.

*****

FINANCIAL

His father died quietly and inconspicuously at Thanksgiving. The

incongruity of death with either the beauties of Lake Geneva or with his

mother's dignified, reticent attitude diverted him, and he looked at the

funeral with an amused tolerance. He decided that burial was after all

preferable to cremation, and he smiled at his old boyhood choice,

slow oxidation in the top of a tree. The day after the ceremony he

was amusing himself in the great library by sinking back on a couch in

graceful mortuary attitudes, trying to determine whether he would, when

his day came, be found with his arms crossed piously over his chest

(Monsignor Darcy had once advocated this posture as being the most

distinguished), or with his hands clasped behind his head, a more pagan

and Byronic attitude.

What interested him much more than the final departure of his father

from things mundane was a tri-cornered conversation between Beatrice,

Mr. Barton, of Barton and Krogman, their lawyers, and himself, that took

place several days after the funeral. For the first time he came into

actual cognizance of the family finances, and realized what a tidy

fortune had once been under his father's management. He took a

ledger labelled "1906" and ran through it rather carefully. The total

expenditure that year had come to something over one hundred and ten

thousand dollars. Forty thousand of this had been Beatrice's own income,

and there had been no attempt to account for it: it was all under the

heading, "Drafts, checks, and letters of credit forwarded to Beatrice

Blaine." The dispersal of the rest was rather minutely itemized: the

taxes and improvements on the Lake Geneva estate had come to almost nine

thousand dollars; the general up-keep, including Beatrice's electric and

a French car, bought that year, was over thirty-five thousand dollars.

The rest was fully taken care of, and there were invariably items which

failed to balance on the right side of the ledger.

In the volume for 1912 Amory was shocked to discover the decrease in the

number of bond holdings and the great drop in the income. In the case of

Beatrice's money this was not so pronounced, but it was obvious that his

father had devoted the previous year to several unfortunate gambles in

oil. Very little of the oil had been burned, but Stephen Blaine had

been rather badly singed. The next year and the next and the next showed

similar decreases, and Beatrice had for the first time begun using her

own money for keeping up the house. Yet her doctor's bill for 1913 had

been over nine thousand dollars.

About the exact state of things Mr. Barton was quite vague and confused.

There had been recent investments, the outcome of which was for

the present problematical, and he had an idea there were further

speculations and exchanges concerning which he had not been consulted.

It was not for several months that Beatrice wrote Amory the full

situation. The entire residue of the Blaine and O'Hara fortunes

consisted of the place at Lake Geneva and approximately a half million

dollars, invested now in fairly conservative six-per-cent holdings. In

fact, Beatrice wrote that she was putting the money into railroad and

street-car bonds as fast as she could conveniently transfer it.

"I am quite sure," she wrote to Amory, "that if there is one

thing we can be positive of, it is that people will not stay in

one place. This Ford person has certainly made the most of that

idea. So I am instructing Mr. Barton to specialize on such things

as Northern Pacific and these Rapid Transit Companies, as they

call the street-cars. I shall never forgive myself for not buying

Bethlehem Steel. I've heard the most fascinating stories. You

must go into finance, Amory. I'm sure you would revel in it.

You start as a messenger or a teller, I believe, and from that you

go up--almost indefinitely. I'm sure if I were a man I'd love the

handling of money; it has become quite a senile passion with me.

Before I get any farther I want to discuss something. A Mrs. Bispam,

an overcordial little lady whom I met at a tea the other day,

told me that her son, he is at Yale, wrote her that all the

boys there wore their summer underwear all during the winter,

and also went about with their heads wet and in low shoes on the

coldest days. Now, Amory, I don't know whether that is a fad at

Princeton too, but I don't want you to be so foolish. It not only

inclines a young man to pneumonia and infantile paralysis, but to

all forms of lung trouble, to which you are particularly

inclined. You cannot experiment with your health. I have found

that out. I will not make myself ridiculous as some mothers no

doubt do, by insisting that you wear overshoes, though I remember

one Christmas you wore them around constantly without a single

buckle latched, making such a curious swishing sound, and you

refused to buckle them because it was not the thing to do. The

very next Christmas you would not wear even rubbers, though I

begged you. You are nearly twenty years old now, dear, and I

can't be with you constantly to find whether you are doing the

sensible thing.

"This has been a very _practical_ letter. I warned you in my last

that the lack of money to do the things one wants to makes one

quite prosy and domestic, but there is still plenty for

everything if we are not too extravagant. Take care of yourself,

my dear boy, and do try to write at least _once_ a week, because I

imagine all sorts of horrible things if I don't hear from you.

Affectionately, MOTHER."

*****

FIRST APPEARANCE OF THE TERM "PERSONAGE"

Monsignor Darcy invited Amory up to the Stuart palace on the Hudson for

a week at Christmas, and they had enormous conversations around the open

fire. Monsignor was growing a trifle stouter and his personality had

expanded even with that, and Amory felt both rest and security in

sinking into a squat, cushioned chair and joining him in the middle-aged

sanity of a cigar.

"I've felt like leaving college, Monsignor."

"Why?"

"All my career's gone up in smoke; you think it's petty and all that,

but--"

"Not at all petty. I think it's most important. I want to hear the whole

thing. Everything you've been doing since I saw you last."

Amory talked; he went thoroughly into the destruction of his egotistic

highways, and in a half-hour the listless quality had left his voice.

"What would you do if you left college?" asked Monsignor.

"Don't know. I'd like to travel, but of course this tiresome war

prevents that. Anyways, mother would hate not having me graduate. I'm

just at sea. Kerry Holiday wants me to go over with him and join the

Lafayette Esquadrille."

"You know you wouldn't like to go."

"Sometimes I would--to-night I'd go in a second."

"Well, you'd have to be very much more tired of life than I think you

are. I know you."

"I'm afraid you do," agreed Amory reluctantly. "It just seemed an easy

way out of everything--when I think of another useless, draggy year."

"Yes, I know; but to tell you the truth, I'm not worried about you; you

seem to me to be progressing perfectly naturally."

"No," Amory objected. "I've lost half my personality in a year."

"Not a bit of it!" scoffed Monsignor. "You've lost a great amount of

vanity and that's all."

"Lordy! I feel, anyway, as if I'd gone through another fifth form at St.

Regis's."

"No." Monsignor shook his head. "That was a misfortune; this has been

a good thing. Whatever worth while comes to you, won't be through the

channels you were searching last year."

"What could be more unprofitable than my present lack of pep?"

"Perhaps in itself... but you're developing. This has given you time to

think and you're casting off a lot of your old luggage about success and

the superman and all. People like us can't adopt whole theories, as you

did. If we can do the next thing, and have an hour a day to think in,

we can accomplish marvels, but as far as any high-handed scheme of blind

dominance is concerned--we'd just make asses of ourselves."

"But, Monsignor, I can't do the next thing."

"Amory, between you and me, I have only just learned to do it myself. I

can do the one hundred things beyond the next thing, but I stub my toe

on that, just as you stubbed your toe on mathematics this fall."

"Why do we have to do the next thing? It never seems the sort of thing I

should do."

"We have to do it because we're not personalities, but personages."

"That's a good line--what do you mean?"

"A personality is what you thought you were, what this Kerry and Sloane

you tell me of evidently are. Personality is a physical matter almost

entirely; it lowers the people it acts on--I've seen it vanish in a

long sickness. But while a personality is active, it overrides 'the next

thing.' Now a personage, on the other hand, gathers. He is never thought

of apart from what he's done. He's a bar on which a thousand things have

been hung--glittering things sometimes, as ours are; but he uses those

things with a cold mentality back of them."

"And several of my most glittering possessions had fallen off when I

needed them." Amory continued the simile eagerly.

"Yes, that's it; when you feel that your garnered prestige and talents

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