This Side of Paradise
longer Sloane of the debonair humor and the happy personality,
but only one of the evil faces that whirled along the turbid
stream.
“Man!” he shouted so loud that the people on the corner turned
and followed them with their eyes, “it’s filthy, and if you can’t
see it, you’re filthy, too!”
“I can’t help it,” said Sloane doggedly. “What’s the matter with
you? Old remorse getting you? You’d be in a fine state if you’d
gone through with our little party.”
“I’m going, Fred,” said Amory slowly. His knees were shaking
under him, and he knew that if he stayed another minute on this
street he would keel over where he stood. “I’ll be at the
Vanderbilt for lunch.” And he strode rapidly off and turned over
to Fifth Avenue. Back at the hotel he felt better, but as he
walked into the barber-shop, intending to get a head massage, the
smell of the powders and tonics brought back Axia’s sidelong,
suggestive smile, and he left hurriedly. In the doorway of his
room a sudden blackness flowed around him like a divided river.
When he came to himself he knew that several hours had passed. He
pitched onto the bed and rolled over on his face with a deadly
fear that he was going mad. He wanted people, people, some one
sane and stupid and good. He lay for he knew not how long without
moving. He could feel the little hot veins on his forehead
standing out, and his terror had hardened on him like plaster. He
felt he was passing up again through the thin crust of horror,
and now only could he distinguish the shadowy twilight he was
leaving. He must have fallen asleep again, for when he next
recollected himself he had paid the hotel bill and was stepping
into a taxi at the door. It was raining torrents.
On the train for Princeton he saw no one he knew, only a crowd of
fagged-looking Philadelphians. The presence of a painted woman
across the aisle filled him with a fresh burst of sickness and he
changed to another car, tried to concentrate on an article in a
popular magazine. He found himself reading the same paragraphs
over and over, so he abandoned this attempt and leaning over
wearily pressed his hot forehead against the damp window-pane.
The car, a smoker, was hot and stuffy with most of the smells of
the state’s alien population; he opened a window and shivered
against the cloud of fog that drifted in over him. The two hours’
ride were like days, and he nearly cried aloud with joy when the
towers of Princeton loomed up beside him and the yellow squares
of light filtered through the blue rain.
Tom was standing in the centre of the room, pensively relighting
a cigar-stub. Amory fancied he looked rather relieved on seeing
him.
“Had a hell of a dream about you last night,” came in the cracked
voice through the cigar smoke. “I had an idea you were in some
trouble.”
“Don’t tell me about it!” Amory almost shrieked. “Don’t say a
word; I’m tired and pepped out.”
Tom looked at him queerly and then sank into a chair and opened
his Italian note-book. Amory threw his coat and hat on the floor,
loosened his collar, and took a Wells novel at random from the
shelf. “Wells is sane,” he thought, “and if he won’t do I’ll read
Rupert Brooke.”
Half an hour passed. Outside the wind came up, and Amory started
as the wet branches moved and clawed with their finger-nails at
the window-pane. Tom was deep in his work, and inside the room
only the occasional scratch of a match or the rustle of leather
as they shifted in their chairs broke the stillness. Then like a
zigzag of lightning came the change. Amory sat bolt upright,
frozen cold in his chair. Tom was looking at him with his mouth
drooping, eyes fixed.
“God help us!” Amory cried.
“Oh, my heavens!” shouted Tom, “look behind!” Quick as a flash
Amory whirled around. He saw nothing but the dark window-pane.
“It’s gone now,” came Tom’s voice after a second in a still
terror. “Something was looking at you.”
Trembling violently, Amory dropped into his chair again.
“I’ve got to tell you,” he said. “I’ve had one hell of an
experience. I think I’ve—I’ve seen the devil or—something like
him. What face did you just see?—or no,” he added quickly, “don’t
tell me!”
And he gave Tom the story. It was midnight when he finished, and
after that, with all lights burning, two sleepy, shivering boys
read to each other from “The New Machiavelli,” until dawn came up
out of Witherspoon Hall, and the Princetonian fell against the
door, and the May birds hailed the sun on last night’s rain.
CHAPTER 4. Narcissus Off Duty
During Princeton’s transition period, that is, during Amory’s
last two years there, while he saw it change and broaden and live
up to its Gothic beauty by better means than night parades,
certain individuals arrived who stirred it to its plethoric
depths. Some of them had been freshmen, and wild freshmen, with
Amory; some were in the class below; and it was in the beginning
of his last year and around small tables at the Nassau Inn that
they began questioning aloud the institutions that Amory and
countless others before him had questioned so long in secret.
First, and partly by accident, they struck on certain books, a
definite type of biographical novel that Amory christened “quest”
books. In the “quest” book the hero set off in life armed with
the best weapons and avowedly intending to use them as such
weapons are usually used, to push their possessors ahead as
selfishly and blindly as possible, but the heroes of the “quest”
books discovered that there might be a more magnificent use for
them. “None Other Gods,” “Sinister Street,” and “The Research
Magnificent” were examples of such books; it was the latter of
these three that gripped Burne Holiday and made him wonder in the
beginning of senior year how much it was worth while being a
diplomatic autocrat around his club on Prospect Avenue and
basking in the high lights of class office. It was distinctly
through the channels of aristocracy that Burne found his way.
Amory, through Kerry, had had a vague drifting acquaintance with
him, but not until January of senior year did their friendship
commence.
“Heard the latest?” said Tom, coming in late one drizzly evening
with that triumphant air he always wore after a successful
conversational bout.
“No. Somebody flunked out? Or another ship sunk?”
“Worse than that. About one-third of the junior class are going
to resign from their clubs.”
“What!”
“Actual fact!”
“Why!”
“Spirit of reform and all that. Burne Holiday is behind it. The
club presidents are holding a meeting to-night to see if they can
find a joint means of combating it.”
“Well, what’s the idea of the thing?”
“Oh, clubs injurious to Princeton democracy; cost a lot; draw
social lines, take time; the regular line you get sometimes from
disappointed sophomores. Woodrow thought they should be abolished
and all that.”
“But this is the real thing?”
“Absolutely. I think it’ll go through.”
“For Pete’s sake, tell me more about it.”
“Well,” began Tom, “it seems that the idea developed
simultaneously in several heads. I was talking to Burne awhile
ago, and he claims that it’s a logical result if an intelligent
person thinks long enough about the social system. They had a
‘discussion crowd’ and the point of abolishing the clubs was
brought up by some one—everybody there leaped at it—it had been
in each one’s mind, more or less, and it just needed a spark to
bring it out.”
“Fine! I swear I think it’ll be most entertaining. How do they
feel up at Cap and Gown?”
“Wild, of course. Every one’s been sitting and arguing and
swearing and getting mad and getting sentimental and getting
brutal. It’s the same at all the clubs; I’ve been the rounds.
They get one of the radicals in the corner and fire questions at
him.”
“How do the radicals stand up?”
“Oh, moderately well. Burne’s a damn good talker, and so
obviously sincere that you can’t get anywhere with him. It’s so
evident that resigning from his club means so much more to him
than preventing it does to us that I felt futile when I argued;
finally took a position that was brilliantly neutral. In fact, I
believe Burne thought for a while that he’d converted me.”
“And you say almost a third of the junior class are going to
resign?”
“Call it a fourth and be safe.”
“Lord—who’d have thought it possible!”
There was a brisk knock at the door, and Burne himself came in.
“Hello, Amory—hello, Tom.”
Amory rose.
“’Evening, Burne. Don’t mind if I seem to rush; I’m going to
Renwick’s.”
Burne turned to him quickly.
“You probably know what I want to talk to Tom about, and it isn’t
a bit private. I wish you’d stay.”
“I’d be glad to.” Amory sat down again, and as Burne perched on a
table and launched into argument with Tom, he looked at this
revolutionary more carefully than he ever had before.
Broad-browed and strong-chinned, with a fineness in the honest
gray eyes that were like Kerry’s, Burne was a man who gave an
immediate impression of bigness and security—stubborn, that was
evident, but his stubbornness wore no stolidity, and when he had
talked for five minutes Amory knew that this keen enthusiasm had
in it no quality of dilettantism.
The intense power Amory felt later in Burne Holiday differed from
the admiration he had had for Humbird. This time it began as
purely a mental interest. With other men of whom he had thought
as primarily first-class, he had been attracted first by their
personalities, and in Burne he missed that immediate magnetism to
which he usually swore allegiance. But that night Amory was
struck by Burne’s intense earnestness, a quality he was
accustomed to associate only with the dread stupidity, and by the
great enthusiasm that struck dead chords in his heart. Burne
stood vaguely for a land Amory hoped he was drifting toward—and
it was almost time that land was in sight. Tom and Amory and Alec
had reached an impasse; never did they seem to have new
experiences in common, for Tom and Alec had been as blindly busy
with their committees and boards as Amory had been blindly
idling, and the things they had for dissection—college,
contemporary personality and the like—they had hashed and
rehashed for many a frugal conversational meal.
That night they discussed the clubs until twelve, and, in the
main, they agreed with Burne. To the roommates it did not seem
such a vital subject as it had in the two years before, but the
logic of Burne’s objections to the social system dovetailed so
completely with everything they had thought, that they questioned
rather than argued, and envied the sanity that enabled this man
to stand out so against all traditions.