This Side of Paradise
Then Amory branched off and found that Burne was deep in other
things as well. Economics had interested him and he was turning
socialist. Pacifism played in the back of his mind, and he read
The Masses and Lyoff Tolstoi faithfully.
“How about religion?” Amory asked him.
“Don’t know. I’m in a muddle about a lot of things—I’ve just
discovered that I’ve a mind, and I’m starting to read.”
“Read what?”
“Everything. I have to pick and choose, of course, but mostly
things to make me think. I’m reading the four gospels now, and
the ‘Varieties of Religious Experience.’”
“What chiefly started you?”
“Wells, I guess, and Tolstoi, and a man named Edward Carpenter.
I’ve been reading for over a year now—on a few lines, on what I
consider the essential lines.”
“Poetry?”
“Well, frankly, not what you call poetry, or for your reasons—you
two write, of course, and look at things differently. Whitman is
the man that attracts me.”
“Whitman?”
“Yes; he’s a definite ethical force.”
“Well, I’m ashamed to say that I’m a blank on the subject of
Whitman. How about you, Tom?”
Tom nodded sheepishly.
“Well,” continued Burne, “you may strike a few poems that are
tiresome, but I mean the mass of his work. He’s tremendous—like
Tolstoi. They both look things in the face, and, somehow,
different as they are, stand for somewhat the same things.”
“You have me stumped, Burne,” Amory admitted. “I’ve read ‘Anna
Karenina’ and the ‘Kreutzer Sonata’ of course, but Tolstoi is
mostly in the original Russian as far as I’m concerned.”
“He’s the greatest man in hundreds of years,” cried Burne
enthusiastically. “Did you ever see a picture of that shaggy old
head of his?”
They talked until three, from biology to organized religion, and
when Amory crept shivering into bed it was with his mind aglow
with ideas and a sense of shock that some one else had discovered
the path he might have followed. Burne Holiday was so evidently
developing—and Amory had considered that he was doing the same.
He had fallen into a deep cynicism over what had crossed his
path, plotted the imperfectability of man and read Shaw and
Chesterton enough to keep his mind from the edges of
decadence—now suddenly all his mental processes of the last year
and a half seemed stale and futile—a petty consummation of
himself... and like a sombre background lay that incident of the
spring before, that filled half his nights with a dreary terror
and made him unable to pray. He was not even a Catholic, yet that
was the only ghost of a code that he had, the gaudy, ritualistic,
paradoxical Catholicism whose prophet was Chesterton, whose
claqueurs were such reformed rakes of literature as Huysmans and
Bourget, whose American sponsor was Ralph Adams Cram, with his
adulation of thirteenth-century cathedrals—a Catholicism which
Amory found convenient and ready-made, without priest or
sacraments or sacrifice.
He could not sleep, so he turned on his reading-lamp and, taking
down the “Kreutzer Sonata,” searched it carefully for the germs
of Burne’s enthusiasm. Being Burne was suddenly so much realler
than being clever. Yet he sighed... here were other possible clay
feet.
He thought back through two years, of Burne as a hurried, nervous
freshman, quite submerged in his brother’s personality. Then he
remembered an incident of sophomore year, in which Burne had been
suspected of the leading role.
Dean Hollister had been heard by a large group arguing with a
taxi-driver, who had driven him from the junction. In the course
of the altercation the dean remarked that he “might as well buy
the taxicab.” He paid and walked off, but next morning he entered
his private office to find the taxicab itself in the space
usually occupied by his desk, bearing a sign which read “Property
of Dean Hollister. Bought and Paid for.”... It took two expert
mechanics half a day to dissemble it into its minutest parts and
remove it, which only goes to prove the rare energy of sophomore
humor under efficient leadership.
Then again, that very fall, Burne had caused a sensation. A
certain Phyllis Styles, an intercollegiate prom-trotter, had
failed to get her yearly invitation to the Harvard-Princeton
game.
Jesse Ferrenby had brought her to a smaller game a few weeks
before, and had pressed Burne into service—to the ruination of
the latter’s misogyny.
“Are you coming to the Harvard game?” Burne had asked
indiscreetly, merely to make conversation.
“If you ask me,” cried Phyllis quickly.
“Of course I do,” said Burne feebly. He was unversed in the arts
of Phyllis, and was sure that this was merely a vapid form of
kidding. Before an hour had passed he knew that he was indeed
involved. Phyllis had pinned him down and served him up, informed
him the train she was arriving by, and depressed him thoroughly.
Aside from loathing Phyllis, he had particularly wanted to stag
that game and entertain some Harvard friends.
“She’ll see,” he informed a delegation who arrived in his room to
josh him. “This will be the last game she ever persuades any
young innocent to take her to!”
“But, Burne—why did you _invite_ her if you didn’t want her?”
“Burne, you _know_ you’re secretly mad about her—that’s the
_real_ trouble.”
“What can _you_ do, Burne? What can _you_ do against Phyllis?”
But Burne only shook his head and muttered threats which
consisted largely of the phrase: “She’ll see, she’ll see!”
The blithesome Phyllis bore her twenty-five summers gayly from
the train, but on the platform a ghastly sight met her eyes.
There were Burne and Fred Sloane arrayed to the last dot like the
lurid figures on college posters. They had bought flaring suits
with huge peg-top trousers and gigantic padded shoulders. On
their heads were rakish college hats, pinned up in front and
sporting bright orange-and-black bands, while from their
celluloid collars blossomed flaming orange ties. They wore black
arm-bands with orange “P’s,” and carried canes flying Princeton
pennants, the effect completed by socks and peeping handkerchiefs
in the same color motifs. On a clanking chain they led a large,
angry tom-cat, painted to represent a tiger.
A good half of the station crowd was already staring at them,
torn between horrified pity and riotous mirth, and as Phyllis,
with her svelte jaw dropping, approached, the pair bent over and
emitted a college cheer in loud, far-carrying voices,
thoughtfully adding the name “Phyllis” to the end. She was
vociferously greeted and escorted enthusiastically across the
campus, followed by half a hundred village urchins—to the stifled
laughter of hundreds of alumni and visitors, half of whom had no
idea that this was a practical joke, but thought that Burne and
Fred were two varsity sports showing their girl a collegiate
time.
Phyllis’s feelings as she was paraded by the Harvard and
Princeton stands, where sat dozens of her former devotees, can be
imagined. She tried to walk a little ahead, she tried to walk a
little behind—but they stayed close, that there should be no
doubt whom she was with, talking in loud voices of their friends
on the football team, until she could almost hear her
acquaintances whispering:
“Phyllis Styles must be _awfully hard up_ to have to come with
_those two_.”
That had been Burne, dynamically humorous, fundamentally serious.
From that root had blossomed the energy that he was now trying to
orient with progress....
So the weeks passed and March came and the clay feet that Amory
looked for failed to appear. About a hundred juniors and seniors
resigned from their clubs in a final fury of righteousness, and
the clubs in helplessness turned upon Burne their finest weapon:
ridicule. Every one who knew him liked him—but what he stood for
(and he began to stand for more all the time) came under the lash
of many tongues, until a frailer man than he would have been
snowed under.
“Don’t you mind losing prestige?” asked Amory one night. They had
taken to exchanging calls several times a week.
“Of course I don’t. What’s prestige, at best?”
“Some people say that you’re just a rather original politician.”
He roared with laughter.
“That’s what Fred Sloane told me to-day. I suppose I have it
coming.”
One afternoon they dipped into a subject that had interested
Amory for a long time—the matter of the bearing of physical
attributes on a man’s make-up. Burne had gone into the biology of
this, and then:
“Of course health counts—a healthy man has twice the chance of
being good,” he said.
“I don’t agree with you—I don’t believe in ‘muscular
Christianity.’”
“I do—I believe Christ had great physical vigor.”
“Oh, no,” Amory protested. “He worked too hard for that. I
imagine that when he died he was a broken-down man—and the great
saints haven’t been strong.”
“Half of them have.”
“Well, even granting that, I don’t think health has anything to
do with goodness; of course, it’s valuable to a great saint to be
able to stand enormous strains, but this fad of popular preachers
rising on their toes in simulated virility, bellowing that
calisthenics will save the world—no, Burne, I can’t go that.”
“Well, let’s waive it—we won’t get anywhere, and besides I
haven’t quite made up my mind about it myself. Now, here’s
something I _do_ know—personal appearance has a lot to do with
it.”
“Coloring?” Amory asked eagerly.
“Yes.”
“That’s what Tom and I figured,” Amory agreed. “We took the
year-books for the last ten years and looked at the pictures of
the senior council. I know you don’t think much of that august
body, but it does represent success here in a general way. Well,
I suppose only about thirty-five per cent of every class here are
blonds, are really light—yet _two-thirds_ of every senior council
are light. We looked at pictures of ten years of them, mind you;
that means that out of every _fifteen_ light-haired men in the
senior class _one_ is on the senior council, and of the
dark-haired men it’s only one in _fifty_.”
“It’s true,” Burne agreed. “The light-haired man _is_ a higher
type, generally speaking. I worked the thing out with the
Presidents of the United States once, and found that way over
half of them were light-haired—yet think of the preponderant
number of brunettes in the race.”
“People unconsciously admit it,” said Amory. “You’ll notice a
blond person is _expected_ to talk. If a blond girl doesn’t talk
we call her a ‘doll’; if a light-haired man is silent he’s
considered stupid. Yet the world is full of ‘dark silent men’ and
‘languorous brunettes’ who haven’t a brain in their heads, but
somehow are never accused of the dearth.”