CHAPTER 2. Spires and Gargoyles 8 page

insane."

On this point Amory could not agree. It seemed to him that life

and history were rife with the strong criminal, keen, but often

self-deluding; in politics and business one found him and among the

old statesmen and kings and generals; but Burne never agreed and their

courses began to split on that point.

Burne was drawing farther and farther away from the world about him. He

resigned the vice-presidency of the senior class and took to reading and

walking as almost his only pursuits. He voluntarily attended graduate

lectures in philosophy and biology, and sat in all of them with a rather

pathetically intent look in his eyes, as if waiting for something the

lecturer would never quite come to. Sometimes Amory would see him squirm

in his seat; and his face would light up; he was on fire to debate a

point.

He grew more abstracted on the street and was even accused of becoming

a snob, but Amory knew it was nothing of the sort, and once when Burne

passed him four feet off, absolutely unseeingly, his mind a thousand

miles away, Amory almost choked with the romantic joy of watching him.

Burne seemed to be climbing heights where others would be forever unable

to get a foothold.

"I tell you," Amory declared to Tom, "he's the first contemporary I've

ever met whom I'll admit is my superior in mental capacity."

"It's a bad time to admit it--people are beginning to think he's odd."

"He's way over their heads--you know you think so yourself when you

talk to him--Good Lord, Tom, you _used_ to stand out against 'people.'

Success has completely conventionalized you."

Tom grew rather annoyed.

"What's he trying to do--be excessively holy?"

"No! not like anybody you've ever seen. Never enters the Philadelphian

Society. He has no faith in that rot. He doesn't believe that public

swimming-pools and a kind word in time will right the wrongs of the

world; moreover, he takes a drink whenever he feels like it."

"He certainly is getting in wrong."

"Have you talked to him lately?"

"No."

"Then you haven't any conception of him."

The argument ended nowhere, but Amory noticed more than ever how the

sentiment toward Burne had changed on the campus.

"It's odd," Amory said to Tom one night when they had grown more

amicable on the subject, "that the people who violently disapprove of

Burne's radicalism are distinctly the Pharisee class--I mean they're the

best-educated men in college--the editors of the papers, like yourself

and Ferrenby, the younger professors.... The illiterate athletes like

Langueduc think he's getting eccentric, but they just say, 'Good old

Burne has got some queer ideas in his head,' and pass on--the Pharisee

class--Gee! they ridicule him unmercifully."

The next morning he met Burne hurrying along McCosh walk after a

recitation.

"Whither bound, Tsar?"

"Over to the Prince office to see Ferrenby," he waved a copy of the

morning's Princetonian at Amory. "He wrote this editorial."

"Going to flay him alive?"

"No--but he's got me all balled up. Either I've misjudged him or he's

suddenly become the world's worst radical."

Burne hurried on, and it was several days before Amory heard an account

of the ensuing conversation. Burne had come into the editor's sanctum

displaying the paper cheerfully.

"Hello, Jesse."

"Hello there, Savonarola."

"I just read your editorial."

"Good boy--didn't know you stooped that low."

"Jesse, you startled me."

"How so?"

"Aren't you afraid the faculty'll get after you if you pull this

irreligious stuff?"

"What?"

"Like this morning."

"What the devil--that editorial was on the coaching system."

"Yes, but that quotation--"

Jesse sat up.

"What quotation?"

"You know: 'He who is not with me is against me.'"

"Well--what about it?"

Jesse was puzzled but not alarmed.

"Well, you say here--let me see." Burne opened the paper and read:

"'_He who is not with me is against me_, as that gentleman said who

was notoriously capable of only coarse distinctions and puerile

generalities.'"

"What of it?" Ferrenby began to look alarmed. "Oliver Cromwell said it,

didn't he? or was it Washington, or one of the saints? Good Lord, I've

forgotten."

Burne roared with laughter.

"Oh, Jesse, oh, good, kind Jesse."

"Who said it, for Pete's sake?"

"Well," said Burne, recovering his voice, "St. Matthew attributes it to

Christ."

"My God!" cried Jesse, and collapsed backward into the waste-basket.

*****

AMORY WRITES A POEM

The weeks tore by. Amory wandered occasionally to New York on the chance

of finding a new shining green auto-bus, that its stick-of-candy

glamour might penetrate his disposition. One day he ventured into a

stock-company revival of a play whose name was faintly familiar. The

curtain rose--he watched casually as a girl entered. A few phrases rang

in his ear and touched a faint chord of memory. Where--? When--?

Then he seemed to hear a voice whispering beside him, a very soft,

vibrant voice: "Oh, I'm such a poor little fool; _do_ tell me when I do

wrong."

The solution came in a flash and he had a quick, glad memory of

Isabelle.

He found a blank space on his programme, and began to scribble rapidly:

"Here in the figured dark I watch once more,

There, with the curtain, roll the years away;

Two years of years--there was an idle day

Of ours, when happy endings didn't bore

Our unfermented souls; I could adore

Your eager face beside me, wide-eyed, gay,

Smiling a repertoire while the poor play

Reached me as a faint ripple reaches shore.

"Yawning and wondering an evening through,

I watch alone... and chatterings, of course,

Spoil the one scene which, somehow, _did_ have charms;

You wept a bit, and I grew sad for you

Right here! Where Mr. X defends divorce

And What's-Her-Name falls fainting in his arms."

*****

STILL CALM

"Ghosts are such dumb things," said Alec, "they're slow-witted. I can

always outguess a ghost."

"How?" asked Tom.

"Well, it depends where. Take a bedroom, for example. If you use _any_

discretion a ghost can never get you in a bedroom."

"Go on, s'pose you think there's maybe a ghost in your bedroom--what

measures do you take on getting home at night?" demanded Amory,

interested.

"Take a stick" answered Alec, with ponderous reverence, "one about the

length of a broom-handle. Now, the first thing to do is to get the room

_cleared_--to do this you rush with your eyes closed into your study

and turn on the lights--next, approaching the closet, carefully run the

stick in the door three or four times. Then, if nothing happens, you can

look in. _Always, always_ run the stick in viciously first--_never_ look

first!"

"Of course, that's the ancient Celtic school," said Tom gravely.

"Yes--but they usually pray first. Anyway, you use this method to clear

the closets and also for behind all doors--"

"And the bed," Amory suggested.

"Oh, Amory, no!" cried Alec in horror. "That isn't the way--the bed

requires different tactics--let the bed alone, as you value your

reason--if there is a ghost in the room and that's only about a third of

the time, it is _almost always_ under the bed."

"Well" Amory began.

Alec waved him into silence.

"Of _course_ you never look. You stand in the middle of the floor and

before he knows what you're going to do make a sudden leap for the

bed--never walk near the bed; to a ghost your ankle is your most

vulnerable part--once in bed, you're safe; he may lie around under the

bed all night, but you're safe as daylight. If you still have doubts

pull the blanket over your head."

"All that's very interesting, Tom."

"Isn't it?" Alec beamed proudly. "All my own, too--the Sir Oliver Lodge

of the new world."

Amory was enjoying college immensely again. The sense of going forward

in a direct, determined line had come back; youth was stirring and

shaking out a few new feathers. He had even stored enough surplus energy

to sally into a new pose.

"What's the idea of all this 'distracted' stuff, Amory?" asked Alec one

day, and then as Amory pretended to be cramped over his book in a daze:

"Oh, don't try to act Burne, the mystic, to me."

Amory looked up innocently.

"What?"

"What?" mimicked Alec. "Are you trying to read yourself into a rhapsody

with--let's see the book."

He snatched it; regarded it derisively.

"Well?" said Amory a little stiffly.

"'The Life of St. Teresa,'" read Alec aloud. "Oh, my gosh!"

"Say, Alec."

"What?"

"Does it bother you?"

"Does what bother me?"

"My acting dazed and all that?"

"Why, no--of course it doesn't _bother_ me."

"Well, then, don't spoil it. If I enjoy going around telling people

guilelessly that I think I'm a genius, let me do it."

"You're getting a reputation for being eccentric," said Alec, laughing,

"if that's what you mean."

Amory finally prevailed, and Alec agreed to accept his face value in the

presence of others if he was allowed rest periods when they were alone;

so Amory "ran it out" at a great rate, bringing the most eccentric

characters to dinner, wild-eyed grad students, preceptors with strange

theories of God and government, to the cynical amazement of the

supercilious Cottage Club.

As February became slashed by sun and moved cheerfully into March,

Amory went several times to spend week-ends with Monsignor; once he

took Burne, with great success, for he took equal pride and delight in

displaying them to each other. Monsignor took him several times to see

Thornton Hancock, and once or twice to the house of a Mrs. Lawrence, a

type of Rome-haunting American whom Amory liked immediately.

Then one day came a letter from Monsignor, which appended an interesting

P. S.:

"Do you know," it ran, "that your third cousin, Clara Page,

widowed six months and very poor, is living in Philadelphia?

I don't think you've ever met her, but I wish, as a favor to me,

you'd go to see her. To my mind, she's rather a remarkable woman,

and just about your age."

Amory sighed and decided to go, as a favor....

*****

CLARA

She was immemorial.... Amory wasn't good enough for Clara, Clara of

ripply golden hair, but then no man was. Her goodness was above the

prosy morals of the husband-seeker, apart from the dull literature of

female virtue.

Sorrow lay lightly around her, and when Amory found her in Philadelphia

he thought her steely blue eyes held only happiness; a latent strength,

a realism, was brought to its fullest development by the facts that

she was compelled to face. She was alone in the world, with two small

children, little money, and, worst of all, a host of friends. He saw

her that winter in Philadelphia entertaining a houseful of men for an

evening, when he knew she had not a servant in the house except the

little colored girl guarding the babies overhead. He saw one of the

greatest libertines in that city, a man who was habitually drunk and

notorious at home and abroad, sitting opposite her for an evening,

discussing _girls' boarding-schools_ with a sort of innocent excitement.

What a twist Clara had to her mind! She could make fascinating and

almost brilliant conversation out of the thinnest air that ever floated

through a drawing-room.

The idea that the girl was poverty-stricken had appealed to Amory's

sense of situation. He arrived in Philadelphia expecting to be told

that 921 Ark Street was in a miserable lane of hovels. He was even

disappointed when it proved to be nothing of the sort. It was an old

house that had been in her husband's family for years. An elderly aunt,

who objected to having it sold, had put ten years' taxes with a

lawyer and pranced off to Honolulu, leaving Clara to struggle with the

heating-problem as best she could. So no wild-haired woman with a hungry

baby at her breast and a sad Amelia-like look greeted him. Instead,

Amory would have thought from his reception that she had not a care in

the world.

A calm virility and a dreamy humor, marked contrasts to her

level-headedness--into these moods she slipped sometimes as a refuge.

She could do the most prosy things (though she was wise enough never

to stultify herself with such "household arts" as _knitting_ and

_embroidery_), yet immediately afterward pick up a book and let her

imagination rove as a formless cloud with the wind. Deepest of all in

her personality was the golden radiance that she diffused around her.

As an open fire in a dark room throws romance and pathos into the quiet

faces at its edge, so she cast her lights and shadows around the rooms

that held her, until she made of her prosy old uncle a man of quaint and

meditative charm, metamorphosed the stray telegraph boy into a Puck-like

creature of delightful originality. At first this quality of hers

somehow irritated Amory. He considered his own uniqueness sufficient,

and it rather embarrassed him when she tried to read new interests into

him for the benefit of what other adorers were present. He felt as if

a polite but insistent stage-manager were attempting to make him give a

new interpretation of a part he had conned for years.

But Clara talking, Clara telling a slender tale of a hatpin and an

inebriated man and herself.... People tried afterward to repeat her

anecdotes but for the life of them they could make them sound like

nothing whatever. They gave her a sort of innocent attention and the

best smiles many of them had smiled for long; there were few tears in

Clara, but people smiled misty-eyed at her.

Very occasionally Amory stayed for little half-hours after the rest of

the court had gone, and they would have bread and jam and tea late in

the afternoon or "maple-sugar lunches," as she called them, at night.

"You _are_ remarkable, aren't you!" Amory was becoming trite from where

he perched in the centre of the dining-room table one six o'clock.

"Not a bit," she answered. She was searching out napkins in the

sideboard. "I'm really most humdrum and commonplace. One of those people

who have no interest in anything but their children."

"Tell that to somebody else," scoffed Amory. "You know you're perfectly

effulgent." He asked her the one thing that he knew might embarrass her.

It was the remark that the first bore made to Adam.

"Tell me about yourself." And she gave the answer that Adam must have

given.

"There's nothing to tell."

But eventually Adam probably told the bore all the things he thought

about at night when the locusts sang in the sandy grass, and he must

have remarked patronizingly how _different_ he was from Eve, forgetting

how different she was from him... at any rate, Clara told Amory much

about herself that evening. She had had a harried life from sixteen on,

and her education had stopped sharply with her leisure. Browsing in her

library, Amory found a tattered gray book out of which fell a yellow

sheet that he impudently opened. It was a poem that she had written

at school about a gray convent wall on a gray day, and a girl with

her cloak blown by the wind sitting atop of it and thinking about the

many-colored world. As a rule such sentiment bored him, but this was

done with so much simplicity and atmosphere, that it brought a picture

of Clara to his mind, of Clara on such a cool, gray day with her keen

blue eyes staring out, trying to see her tragedies come marching over

the gardens outside. He envied that poem. How he would have loved to

have come along and seen her on the wall and talked nonsense or romance

to her, perched above him in the air. He began to be frightfully jealous

of everything about Clara: of her past, of her babies, of the men and

women who flocked to drink deep of her cool kindness and rest their

tired minds as at an absorbing play.

"_Nobody_ seems to bore you," he objected.

"About half the world do," she admitted, "but I think that's a pretty

good average, don't you?" and she turned to find something in Browning

that bore on the subject. She was the only person he ever met who

could look up passages and quotations to show him in the middle of

the conversation, and yet not be irritating to distraction. She did it

constantly, with such a serious enthusiasm that he grew fond of watching

her golden hair bent over a book, brow wrinkled ever so little at

hunting her sentence.

Through early March he took to going to Philadelphia for week-ends.

Almost always there was some one else there and she seemed not anxious

to see him alone, for many occasions presented themselves when a word

from her would have given him another delicious half-hour of adoration.

But he fell gradually in love and began to speculate wildly on marriage.

Though this design flowed through his brain even to his lips, still

he knew afterward that the desire had not been deeply rooted. Once he

dreamt that it had come true and woke up in a cold panic, for in his

dream she had been a silly, flaxen Clara, with the gold gone out of her

hair and platitudes falling insipidly from her changeling tongue. But

she was the first fine woman he ever knew and one of the few good people

who ever interested him. She made her goodness such an asset. Amory

had decided that most good people either dragged theirs after them as a

liability, or else distorted it to artificial geniality, and of course

there were the ever-present prig and Pharisee--(but Amory never included

_them_ as being among the saved).

*****

ST. CECILIA

"Over her gray and velvet dress,

Under her molten, beaten hair,

Color of rose in mock distress

Flushes and fades and makes her fair;

Fills the air from her to him

With light and languor and little sighs,

Just so subtly he scarcely knows...

Laughing lightning, color of rose."

"Do you like me?"

"Of course I do," said Clara seriously.

"Why?"

"Well, we have some qualities in common. Things that are spontaneous in

each of us--or were originally."

"You're implying that I haven't used myself very well?"

Clara hesitated.

"Well, I can't judge. A man, of course, has to go through a lot more,

and I've been sheltered."

"Oh, don't stall, please, Clara," Amory interrupted; "but do talk about

me a little, won't you?"

"Surely, I'd adore to." She didn't smile.

"That's sweet of you. First answer some questions. Am I painfully

conceited?"

"Well--no, you have tremendous vanity, but it'll amuse the people who

notice its preponderance."

"I see."

"You're really humble at heart. You sink to the third hell of depression

when you think you've been slighted. In fact, you haven't much

self-respect."

"Centre of target twice, Clara. How do you do it? You never let me say a

word."

"Of course not--I can never judge a man while he's talking. But I'm not

through; the reason you have so little real self-confidence, even though

you gravely announce to the occasional philistine that you think you're

a genius, is that you've attributed all sorts of atrocious faults to

yourself and are trying to live up to them. For instance, you're always

saying that you are a slave to high-balls."

"But I am, potentially."

"And you say you're a weak character, that you've no will."

"Not a bit of will--I'm a slave to my emotions, to my likes, to my

hatred of boredom, to most of my desires--"

"You are not!" She brought one little fist down onto the other.

"You're a slave, a bound helpless slave to one thing in the world, your

imagination."

"You certainly interest me. If this isn't boring you, go on."

"I notice that when you want to stay over an extra day from college you

go about it in a sure way. You never decide at first while the merits of

going or staying are fairly clear in your mind. You let your imagination

shinny on the side of your desires for a few hours, and then you decide.

Naturally your imagination, after a little freedom, thinks up a million

reasons why you should stay, so your decision when it comes isn't true.

It's biassed."

"Yes," objected Amory, "but isn't it lack of will-power to let my

imagination shinny on the wrong side?"

"My dear boy, there's your big mistake. This has nothing to do with

will-power; that's a crazy, useless word, anyway; you lack judgment--the

judgment to decide at once when you know your imagination will play you

false, given half a chance."

"Well, I'll be darned!" exclaimed Amory in surprise, "that's the last

thing I expected."

Clara didn't gloat. She changed the subject immediately. But she had

started him thinking and he believed she was partly right. He felt like

a factory-owner who after accusing a clerk of dishonesty finds that his

own son, in the office, is changing the books once a week. His poor,

mistreated will that he had been holding up to the scorn of himself and

his friends, stood before him innocent, and his judgment walked off to

prison with the unconfinable imp, imagination, dancing in mocking glee

beside him. Clara's was the only advice he ever asked without dictating

the answer himself--except, perhaps, in his talks with Monsignor Darcy.

How he loved to do any sort of thing with Clara! Shopping with her was a

rare, epicurean dream. In every store where she had ever traded she was

whispered about as the beautiful Mrs. Page.

"I'll bet she won't stay single long."

"Well, don't scream it out. She ain't lookin' for no advice."

"_Ain't_ she beautiful!"

(Enter a floor-walker--silence till he moves forward, smirking.)

"Society person, ain't she?"

"Yeah, but poor now, I guess; so they say."

"Gee! girls, _ain't_ she some kid!"

And Clara beamed on all alike. Amory believed that tradespeople gave her

discounts, sometimes to her knowledge and sometimes without it. He knew

she dressed very well, had always the best of everything in the house,

and was inevitably waited upon by the head floor-walker at the very

least.

Sometimes they would go to church together on Sunday and he would walk

beside her and revel in her cheeks moist from the soft water in the new

air. She was very devout, always had been, and God knows what heights

she attained and what strength she drew down to herself when she knelt

and bent her golden hair into the stained-glass light.

"St. Cecelia," he cried aloud one day, quite involuntarily, and the

people turned and peered, and the priest paused in his sermon and Clara

and Amory turned to fiery red.

That was the last Sunday they had, for he spoiled it all that night. He

couldn't help it.

They were walking through the March twilight where it was as warm as

June, and the joy of youth filled his soul so that he felt he must

speak.

"I think," he said and his voice trembled, "that if I lost faith in you

I'd lose faith in God."

She looked at him with such a startled face that he asked her the

matter.

"Nothing," she said slowly, "only this: five men have said that to me

before, and it frightens me."

"Oh, Clara, is that your fate!"

She did not answer.

"I suppose love to you is--" he began.

She turned like a flash.

"I have never been in love."

They walked along, and he realized slowly how much she had told him...

never in love.... She seemed suddenly a daughter of light alone. His

entity dropped out of her plane and he longed only to touch her dress

with almost the realization that Joseph must have had of Mary's eternal

significance. But quite mechanically he heard himself saying:

"And I love you--any latent greatness that I've got is... oh, I can't

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