This Side of Paradise
was written over six times and had the names of nine
collaborators on the programme. All Triangle shows started by
being “something different—not just a regular musical comedy,”
but when the several authors, the president, the coach and the
faculty committee finished with it, there remained just the old
reliable Triangle show with the old reliable jokes and the star
comedian who got expelled or sick or something just before the
trip, and the dark-whiskered man in the pony-ballet, who
“absolutely won’t shave twice a day, doggone it!”
There was one brilliant place in “Ha-Ha Hortense!” It is a
Princeton tradition that whenever a Yale man who is a member of
the widely advertised “Skull and Bones” hears the sacred name
mentioned, he must leave the room. It is also a tradition that
the members are invariably successful in later life, amassing
fortunes or votes or coupons or whatever they choose to amass.
Therefore, at each performance of “Ha-Ha Hortense!” half-a-dozen
seats were kept from sale and occupied by six of the
worst-looking vagabonds that could be hired from the streets,
further touched up by the Triangle make-up man. At the moment in
the show where Firebrand, the Pirate Chief, pointed at his black
flag and said, “I am a Yale graduate—note my Skull and Bones!”—at
this very moment the six vagabonds were instructed to rise
_conspicuously_ and leave the theatre with looks of deep
melancholy and an injured dignity. It was claimed though never
proved that on one occasion the hired Elis were swelled by one of
the real thing.
They played through vacation to the fashionable of eight cities.
Amory liked Louisville and Memphis best: these knew how to meet
strangers, furnished extraordinary punch, and flaunted an
astonishing array of feminine beauty. Chicago he approved for a
certain verve that transcended its loud accent—however, it was a
Yale town, and as the Yale Glee Club was expected in a week the
Triangle received only divided homage. In Baltimore, Princeton
was at home, and every one fell in love. There was a proper
consumption of strong waters all along the line; one man
invariably went on the stage highly stimulated, claiming that his
particular interpretation of the part required it. There were
three private cars; however, no one slept except in the third
car, which was called the “animal car,” and where were herded the
spectacled wind-jammers of the orchestra. Everything was so
hurried that there was no time to be bored, but when they arrived
in Philadelphia, with vacation nearly over, there was rest in
getting out of the heavy atmosphere of flowers and grease-paint,
and the ponies took off their corsets with abdominal pains and
sighs of relief.
When the disbanding came, Amory set out post haste for
Minneapolis, for Sally Weatherby’s cousin, Isabelle Borge, was
coming to spend the winter in Minneapolis while her parents went
abroad. He remembered Isabelle only as a little girl with whom he
had played sometimes when he first went to Minneapolis. She had
gone to Baltimore to live—but since then she had developed a
past.
Amory was in full stride, confident, nervous, and jubilant.
Scurrying back to Minneapolis to see a girl he had known as a
child seemed the interesting and romantic thing to do, so without
compunction he wired his mother not to expect him... sat in the
train, and thought about himself for thirty-six hours.
“PETTING”
On the Triangle trip Amory had come into constant contact with
that great current American phenomenon, the “petting party.”
None of the Victorian mothers—and most of the mothers were
Victorian—had any idea how casually their daughters were
accustomed to be kissed. “Servant-girls are that way,” says Mrs.
Huston-Carmelite to her popular daughter. “They are kissed first
and proposed to afterward.”
But the Popular Daughter becomes engaged every six months between
sixteen and twenty-two, when she arranges a match with young
Hambell, of Cambell & Hambell, who fatuously considers himself
her first love, and between engagements the P. D. (she is
selected by the cut-in system at dances, which favors the
survival of the fittest) has other sentimental last kisses in the
moonlight, or the firelight, or the outer darkness.
Amory saw girls doing things that even in his memory would have
been impossible: eating three-o’clock, after-dance suppers in
impossible cafes, talking of every side of life with an air half
of earnestness, half of mockery, yet with a furtive excitement
that Amory considered stood for a real moral let-down. But he
never realized how wide-spread it was until he saw the cities
between New York and Chicago as one vast juvenile intrigue.
Afternoon at the Plaza, with winter twilight hovering outside and
faint drums down-stairs... they strut and fret in the lobby,
taking another cocktail, scrupulously attired and waiting. Then
the swinging doors revolve and three bundles of fur mince in. The
theatre comes afterward; then a table at the Midnight Frolic—of
course, mother will be along there, but she will serve only to
make things more secretive and brilliant as she sits in solitary
state at the deserted table and thinks such entertainments as
this are not half so bad as they are painted, only rather
wearying. But the P. D. is in love again... it was odd, wasn’t
it?—that though there was so much room left in the taxi the P. D.
and the boy from Williams were somehow crowded out and had to go
in a separate car. Odd! Didn’t you notice how flushed the P. D.
was when she arrived just seven minutes late? But the P. D. “gets
away with it.”
The “belle” had become the “flirt,” the “flirt” had become the
“baby vamp.” The “belle” had five or six callers every afternoon.
If the P. D., by some strange accident, has two, it is made
pretty uncomfortable for the one who hasn’t a date with her. The
“belle” was surrounded by a dozen men in the intermissions
between dances. Try to find the P. D. between dances, just _try_
to find her.
The same girl... deep in an atmosphere of jungle music and the
questioning of moral codes. Amory found it rather fascinating to
feel that any popular girl he met before eight he might quite
possibly kiss before twelve.
“Why on earth are we here?” he asked the girl with the green
combs one night as they sat in some one’s limousine, outside the
Country Club in Louisville.
“I don’t know. I’m just full of the devil.”
“Let’s be frank—we’ll never see each other again. I wanted to
come out here with you because I thought you were the
best-looking girl in sight. You really don’t care whether you
ever see me again, do you?”
“No—but is this your line for every girl? What have I done to
deserve it?”
“And you didn’t feel tired dancing or want a cigarette or any of
the things you said? You just wanted to be—”
“Oh, let’s go in,” she interrupted, “if you want to _analyze_.
Let’s not _talk_ about it.”
When the hand-knit, sleeveless jerseys were stylish, Amory, in a
burst of inspiration, named them “petting shirts.” The name
travelled from coast to coast on the lips of parlor-snakes and P.
D.’s.
DESCRIPTIVE
Amory was now eighteen years old, just under six feet tall and
exceptionally, but not conventionally, handsome. He had rather a
young face, the ingenuousness of which was marred by the
penetrating green eyes, fringed with long dark eyelashes. He
lacked somehow that intense animal magnetism that so often
accompanies beauty in men or women; his personality seemed rather
a mental thing, and it was not in his power to turn it on and off
like a water-faucet. But people never forgot his face.
ISABELLE
She paused at the top of the staircase. The sensations attributed
to divers on spring-boards, leading ladies on opening nights, and
lumpy, husky young men on the day of the Big Game, crowded
through her. She should have descended to a burst of drums or a
discordant blend of themes from “Thais” and “Carmen.” She had
never been so curious about her appearance, she had never been so
satisfied with it. She had been sixteen years old for six months.
“Isabelle!” called her cousin Sally from the doorway of the
dressing-room.
“I’m ready.” She caught a slight lump of nervousness in her
throat.
“I had to send back to the house for another pair of slippers.
It’ll be just a minute.”
Isabelle started toward the dressing-room for a last peek in the
mirror, but something decided her to stand there and gaze down
the broad stairs of the Minnehaha Club. They curved
tantalizingly, and she could catch just a glimpse of two pairs of
masculine feet in the hall below. Pump-shod in uniform black,
they gave no hint of identity, but she wondered eagerly if one
pair were attached to Amory Blaine. This young man, not as yet
encountered, had nevertheless taken up a considerable part of her
day—the first day of her arrival. Coming up in the machine from
the station, Sally had volunteered, amid a rain of question,
comment, revelation, and exaggeration:
“You remember Amory Blaine, of _course_. Well, he’s simply mad to
see you again. He’s stayed over a day from college, and he’s
coming to-night. He’s heard so much about you—says he remembers
your eyes.”
This had pleased Isabelle. It put them on equal terms, although
she was quite capable of staging her own romances, with or
without advance advertising. But following her happy tremble of
anticipation, came a sinking sensation that made her ask:
“How do you mean he’s heard about me? What sort of things?”
Sally smiled. She felt rather in the capacity of a showman with
her more exotic cousin.
“He knows you’re—you’re considered beautiful and all that”—she
paused—“and I guess he knows you’ve been kissed.”
At this Isabelle’s little fist had clinched suddenly under the
fur robe. She was accustomed to be thus followed by her desperate
past, and it never failed to rouse in her the same feeling of
resentment; yet—in a strange town it was an advantageous
reputation. She was a “Speed,” was she? Well—let them find out.
Out of the window Isabelle watched the snow glide by in the
frosty morning. It was ever so much colder here than in
Baltimore; she had not remembered; the glass of the side door was
iced, the windows were shirred with snow in the corners. Her mind
played still with one subject. Did _he_ dress like that boy
there, who walked calmly down a bustling business street, in
moccasins and winter-carnival costume? How very _Western!_ Of
course he wasn’t that way: he went to Princeton, was a sophomore
or something. Really she had no distinct idea of him. An ancient
snap-shot she had preserved in an old kodak book had impressed
her by the big eyes (which he had probably grown up to by now).