This Side of Paradise
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 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 mediaevalist,” 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.”