“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“Just to be dramatic, I’ll let you know that if it’s blue, my name is withdrawn from the editorial board of the Prince, and my short career is over.”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....”t
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 tricornered 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 fartber 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.”u
“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 and all that are hung out, you need never bother about anybody; you can cope with them without difficulty.”
“But, on the other hand, if I haven’t my possessions, I’m helpless!”
“Absolutely.”
“That’s certainly an idea.”
“Now you’ve a clean start—a start Kerry or Sloane can constitutionally never have. You brushed three or four ornaments down, and, in a fit of pique, knocked off the rest of them. The thing now is to collect some new ones, and the farther you look ahead in the collecting the better. But remember, do the next thing!”
“How clear you can make things!”
So they talked, often about themselves, sometimes of philosophy and religion, and life as respectively a game or a mystery. The priest seemed to guess Amory’s thoughts before they were clear in his own head, so closely related were their minds in form and groove.
“Why do I make lists?” Amory asked him one night. “Lists of all sorts of things?”
“Because you’re a mediævalist,” Monsignor answered. “We both are. It’s the passion for classifying and finding a type.”
“It’s a desire to get something definite.”
“It’s the nucleus of scholastic philosophy.”
“I was beginning to think I was growing eccentric till I came up here. It was a pose, I guess.”
“Don’t worry about that; for you not posing may be the biggest pose of all. Pose——”
“Yes?”
“But do the next thing.”
After Amory returned to college he received several letters from Monsignor which gave him more egotistic food for consumption.
I am afraid that I gave you too much assurance of your inevitable safety, and you must remember that I did that through faith in your springs of effort; not in the silly conviction that you will arrive without struggle. Some nuances of character you will have to take for granted in yourself, though you must be careful in confessing them to others. You are unsentimental, almost incapable of affection, astute without being cunning and vain without being proud.
Don’t let yourself feel worthless; often through life you will really be at your worst when you seem to think best of yourself; and don’t worry about losing your “personality, ” as you persist in calling it; at fifteen you had the radiance of early morning, at twenty you will begin to have the melancholy brilliance of the moon, and when you are my age you will give out, as I do, the genial golden warmth of 4 P.M.
If you write me letters, please let them be natural on
es. Your last, that dissertation on architecture, was perfectly awful—so “highbrow” that I picture you living in an intellectual and emotional vacuum; and beware of trying to classify people too definitely into types; you will find that all through their youth they will persist annoyingly in jumping from class to class, and by pasting a supercilious label on every one you meet you are merely packing a Jack-in-the-box that will spring up and leer at you when you begin to come into really antagonistic contact with the world. An idealization of some such a man as Leonardo da Vinci would be a more valuable beacon to you at present.
You are bound to go up and down, just as I did in my youth, but do keep your clarity of mind, and if fools or sages dare to criticise don’t blame yourself too much.
You say that convention is all that really keeps you straight in this “woman proposition”; but it’s more than that, Amory; it’s the fear that what you begin you can’t stop; you would run amuck, and
I know whereof I speak; it’s that half-miraculous sixth sense by which you detect evil, it’s the half-realized fear of God in your heart.
Whatever your metier proves to be—religion, architecture, literature —I’m sure you would be much safer anchored to the Church, but I won’t risk my influence by arguing with you even though I am secretly sure that the “black chasm of Romanism” yawns beneath you. Do write me soon.
With affectionate regards,
Thayer Darcy.
Even Amory’s reading paled during this period; he delved further into the misty side streets of literature: Huysmans, Walter Pater, Theophile Gautier, and the racier sections of Rabelais, Boccaccio, Petronius, and Suetonius. One week, through general curiosity, he inspected the private libraries of his classmates and found Sloane’s as typical as any: sets of Kipling, O. Henry, John Fox, Jr., and Richard Harding Davis; “What Every Middle-Aged Woman Ought to Know,” “The Spell of the Yukon”; a “gift” copy of James Whitcomb Riley, an assortment of battered, annotated schoolbooks, and, finally, to his surprise, one of his own late discoveries, the collected poems of Rupert Brooke.
This Side of Paradise (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) Page 14