This Side of Paradise
“And the large mouth and broad chin and rather big nose
undoubtedly make the superior face.”
“I’m not so sure.” Amory was all for classical features.
“Oh, yes—I’ll show you,” and Burne pulled out of his desk a
photographic collection of heavily bearded, shaggy
celebrities—Tolstoi, Whitman, Carpenter, and others.
“Aren’t they wonderful?”
Amory tried politely to appreciate them, and gave up laughingly.
“Burne, I think they’re the ugliest-looking crowd I ever came
across. They look like an old man’s home.”
“Oh, Amory, look at that forehead on Emerson; look at Tolstoi’s
eyes.” His tone was reproachful.
Amory shook his head.
“No! Call them remarkable-looking or anything you want—but ugly
they certainly are.”
Unabashed, Burne ran his hand lovingly across the spacious
foreheads, and piling up the pictures put them back in his desk.
Walking at night was one of his favorite pursuits, and one night
he persuaded Amory to accompany him.
“I hate the dark,” Amory objected. “I didn’t use to—except when I
was particularly imaginative, but now, I really do—I’m a regular
fool about it.”
“That’s useless, you know.”
“Quite possibly.”
“We’ll go east,” Burne suggested, “and down that string of roads
through the woods.”
“Doesn’t sound very appealing to me,” admitted Amory reluctantly,
“but let’s go.”
They set off at a good gait, and for an hour swung along in a
brisk argument until the lights of Princeton were luminous white
blots behind them.
“Any person with any imagination is bound to be afraid,” said
Burne earnestly. “And this very walking at night is one of the
things I was afraid about. I’m going to tell you why I can walk
anywhere now and not be afraid.”
“Go on,” Amory urged eagerly. They were striding toward the
woods, Burne’s nervous, enthusiastic voice warming to his
subject.
“I used to come out here alone at night, oh, three months ago,
and I always stopped at that cross-road we just passed. There
were the woods looming up ahead, just as they do now, there were
dogs howling and the shadows and no human sound. Of course, I
peopled the woods with everything ghastly, just like you do;
don’t you?”
“I do,” Amory admitted.
“Well, I began analyzing it—my imagination persisted in sticking
horrors into the dark—so I stuck my imagination into the dark
instead, and let it look out at me—I let it play stray dog or
escaped convict or ghost, and then saw myself coming along the
road. That made it all right—as it always makes everything all
right to project yourself completely into another’s place. I knew
that if I were the dog or the convict or the ghost I wouldn’t be
a menace to Burne Holiday any more than he was a menace to me.
Then I thought of my watch. I’d better go back and leave it and
then essay the woods. No; I decided, it’s better on the whole
that I should lose a watch than that I should turn back—and I did
go into them—not only followed the road through them, but walked
into them until I wasn’t frightened any more—did it until one
night I sat down and dozed off in there; then I knew I was
through being afraid of the dark.”
“Lordy,” Amory breathed. “I couldn’t have done that. I’d have
come out half-way, and the first time an automobile passed and
made the dark thicker when its lamps disappeared, I’d have come
in.”
“Well,” Burne said suddenly, after a few moments’ silence, “we’re
half-way through, let’s turn back.”
On the return he launched into a discussion of will.
“It’s the whole thing,” he asserted. “It’s the one dividing line
between good and evil. I’ve never met a man who led a rotten life
and didn’t have a weak will.”
“How about great criminals?”
“They’re usually insane. If not, they’re weak. There is no such
thing as a strong, sane criminal.”
“Burne, I disagree with you altogether; how about the superman?”
“Well?”
“He’s evil, I think, yet he’s strong and sane.”
“I’ve never met him. I’ll bet, though, that he’s stupid or
insane.”
“I’ve met him over and over and he’s neither. That’s why I think
you’re wrong.”
“I’m sure I’m not—and so I don’t believe in imprisonment except
for the insane.”
On this point Amory could not agree. It seemed to him that life
and history were rife with the strong criminal, keen, but often
self-deluding; in politics and business one found him and among
the old statesmen and kings and generals; but Burne never agreed
and their courses began to split on that point.
Burne was drawing farther and farther away from the world about
him. He resigned the vice-presidency of the senior class and took
to reading and walking as almost his only pursuits. He
voluntarily attended graduate lectures in philosophy and biology,
and sat in all of them with a rather pathetically intent look in
his eyes, as if waiting for something the lecturer would never
quite come to. Sometimes Amory would see him squirm in his seat;
and his face would light up; he was on fire to debate a point.
He grew more abstracted on the street and was even accused of
becoming a snob, but Amory knew it was nothing of the sort, and
once when Burne passed him four feet off, absolutely unseeingly,
his mind a thousand miles away, Amory almost choked with the
romantic joy of watching him. Burne seemed to be climbing heights
where others would be forever unable to get a foothold.
“I tell you,” Amory declared to Tom, “he’s the first contemporary
I’ve ever met whom I’ll admit is my superior in mental capacity.”
“It’s a bad time to admit it—people are beginning to think he’s
odd.”
“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