“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 f
irst 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.”
Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald UK (Illustrated) Page 14