This Side of Paradise
the closet, carefully run the stick in the door three or four
times. Then, if nothing happens, you can look in. _Always,
always_ run the stick in viciously first—_never_ look first!”
“Of course, that’s the ancient Celtic school,” said Tom gravely.
“Yes—but they usually pray first. Anyway, you use this method to
clear the closets and also for behind all doors—”
“And the bed,” Amory suggested.
“Oh, Amory, no!” cried Alec in horror. “That isn’t the way—the
bed requires different tactics—let the bed alone, as you value
your reason—if there is a ghost in the room and that’s only about
a third of the time, it is _almost always_ under the bed.”
“Well” Amory began.
Alec waved him into silence.
“Of _course_ you never look. You stand in the middle of the floor
and before he knows what you’re going to do make a sudden leap
for the bed—never walk near the bed; to a ghost your ankle is
your most vulnerable part—once in bed, you’re safe; he may lie
around under the bed all night, but you’re safe as daylight. If
you still have doubts pull the blanket over your head.”
“All that’s very interesting, Tom.”
“Isn’t it?” Alec beamed proudly. “All my own, too—the Sir Oliver
Lodge of the new world.”
Amory was enjoying college immensely again. The sense of going
forward in a direct, determined line had come back; youth was
stirring and shaking out a few new feathers. He had even stored
enough surplus energy to sally into a new pose.
“What’s the idea of all this ‘distracted’ stuff, Amory?” asked
Alec one day, and then as Amory pretended to be cramped over his
book in a daze: “Oh, don’t try to act Burne, the mystic, to me.”
Amory looked up innocently.
“What?”
“What?” mimicked Alec. “Are you trying to read yourself into a
rhapsody with—let’s see the book.”
He snatched it; regarded it derisively.
“Well?” said Amory a little stiffly.
“‘The Life of St. Teresa,’” read Alec aloud. “Oh, my gosh!”
“Say, Alec.”
“What?”
“Does it bother you?”
“Does what bother me?”
“My acting dazed and all that?”
“Why, no—of course it doesn’t _bother_ me.”
“Well, then, don’t spoil it. If I enjoy going around telling
people guilelessly that I think I’m a genius, let me do it.”
“You’re getting a reputation for being eccentric,” said Alec,
laughing, “if that’s what you mean.”
Amory finally prevailed, and Alec agreed to accept his face value
in the presence of others if he was allowed rest periods when
they were alone; so Amory “ran it out” at a great rate, bringing
the most eccentric characters to dinner, wild-eyed grad students,
preceptors with strange theories of God and government, to the
cynical amazement of the supercilious Cottage Club.
As February became slashed by sun and moved cheerfully into
March, Amory went several times to spend week-ends with
Monsignor; once he took Burne, with great success, for he took
equal pride and delight in displaying them to each other.
Monsignor took him several times to see Thornton Hancock, and
once or twice to the house of a Mrs. Lawrence, a type of
Rome-haunting American whom Amory liked immediately.
Then one day came a letter from Monsignor, which appended an
interesting P. S.:
“Do you know,” it ran, “that your third cousin, Clara Page, widowed
six months and very poor, is living in Philadelphia? I don’t think
you’ve ever met her, but I wish, as a favor to me, you’d go to see
her. To my mind, she’s rather a remarkable woman, and just about
your age.”
Amory sighed and decided to go, as a favor....
CLARA
She was immemorial.... Amory wasn’t good enough for Clara, Clara
of ripply golden hair, but then no man was. Her goodness was
above the prosy morals of the husband-seeker, apart from the dull
literature of female virtue.
Sorrow lay lightly around her, and when Amory found her in
Philadelphia he thought her steely blue eyes held only happiness;
a latent strength, a realism, was brought to its fullest
development by the facts that she was compelled to face. She was
alone in the world, with two small children, little money, and,
worst of all, a host of friends. He saw her that winter in
Philadelphia entertaining a houseful of men for an evening, when
he knew she had not a servant in the house except the little
colored girl guarding the babies overhead. He saw one of the
greatest libertines in that city, a man who was habitually drunk
and notorious at home and abroad, sitting opposite her for an
evening, discussing _girls’ boarding-schools_ with a sort of
innocent excitement. What a twist Clara had to her mind! She
could make fascinating and almost brilliant conversation out of
the thinnest air that ever floated through a drawing-room.
The idea that the girl was poverty-stricken had appealed to
Amory’s sense of situation. He arrived in Philadelphia expecting
to be told that 921 Ark Street was in a miserable lane of hovels.
He was even disappointed when it proved to be nothing of the
sort. It was an old house that had been in her husband’s family
for years. An elderly aunt, who objected to having it sold, had
put ten years’ taxes with a lawyer and pranced off to Honolulu,
leaving Clara to struggle with the heating-problem as best she
could. So no wild-haired woman with a hungry baby at her breast
and a sad Amelia-like look greeted him. Instead, Amory would have
thought from his reception that she had not a care in the world.
A calm virility and a dreamy humor, marked contrasts to her
level-headedness—into these moods she slipped sometimes as a
refuge. She could do the most prosy things (though she was wise
enough never to stultify herself with such “household arts” as
_knitting_ and _embroidery_), yet immediately afterward pick up a
book and let her imagination rove as a formless cloud with the
wind. Deepest of all in her personality was the golden radiance
that she diffused around her. As an open fire in a dark room
throws romance and pathos into the quiet faces at its edge, so
she cast her lights and shadows around the rooms that held her,
until she made of her prosy old uncle a man of quaint and
meditative charm, metamorphosed the stray telegraph boy into a
Puck-like creature of delightful originality. At first this
quality of hers somehow irritated Amory. He considered his own
uniqueness sufficient, and it rather embarrassed him when she
tried to read new interests into him for the benefit of what
other adorers were present. He felt as if a polite but insistent
stage-manager were attempting to make him give a new
interpretation of a part he had conned for years.
But Clara talking, Clara telling a slender tale of a hatpin and
an inebriated man and herself.... People tried afterward to
repeat her anecdotes but for the life of them they could make
them sound like nothing whatever. They gave her a sort of
innocent attention and the best smiles many of them had smiled
for long; there were few tears in Clara, but people smiled
misty-eyed at her.
Very occasionally Amory stayed for little half-hours after the
rest of the court had gone, and they would have bread and jam and
tea late in the afternoon or “maple-sugar lunches,” as she called
them, at night.
“You _are_ remarkable, aren’t you!” Amory was becoming trite from
where he perched in the centre of the dining-room table one six
o’clock.
“Not a bit,” she answered. She was searching out napkins in the
sideboard. “I’m really most humdrum and commonplace. One of those
people who have no interest in anything but their children.”
“Tell that to somebody else,” scoffed Amory. “You know you’re
perfectly effulgent.” He asked her the one thing that he knew
might embarrass her. It was the remark that the first bore made
to Adam.
“Tell me about yourself.” And she gave the answer that Adam must
have given.
“There’s nothing to tell.”
But eventually Adam probably told the bore all the things he
thought about at night when the locusts sang in the sandy grass,
and he must have remarked patronizingly how _different_ he was
from Eve, forgetting how different she was from him... at any
rate, Clara told Amory much about herself that evening. She had
had a harried life from sixteen on, and her education had stopped
sharply with her leisure. Browsing in her library, Amory found a
tattered gray book out of which fell a yellow sheet that he
impudently opened. It was a poem that she had written at school
about a gray convent wall on a gray day, and a girl with her
cloak blown by the wind sitting atop of it and thinking about the
many-colored world. As a rule such sentiment bored him, but this
was done with so much simplicity and atmosphere, that it brought
a picture of Clara to his mind, of Clara on such a cool, gray day
with her keen blue eyes staring out, trying to see her tragedies
come marching over the gardens outside. He envied that poem. How
he would have loved to have come along and seen her on the wall
and talked nonsense or romance to her, perched above him in the
air. He began to be frightfully jealous of everything about
Clara: of her past, of her babies, of the men and women who
flocked to drink deep of her cool kindness and rest their tired
minds as at an absorbing play.
“_Nobody_ seems to bore you,” he objected.
“About half the world do,” she admitted, “but I think that’s a
pretty good average, don’t you?” and she turned to find something
in Browning that bore on the subject. She was the only person he
ever met who could look up passages and quotations to show him in
the middle of the conversation, and yet not be irritating to
distraction. She did it constantly, with such a serious
enthusiasm that he grew fond of watching her golden hair bent
over a book, brow wrinkled ever so little at hunting her
sentence.
Through early March he took to going to Philadelphia for
week-ends. Almost always there was some one else there and she
seemed not anxious to see him alone, for many occasions presented
themselves when a word from her would have given him another
delicious half-hour of adoration. But he fell gradually in love
and began to speculate wildly on marriage. Though this design
flowed through his brain even to his lips, still he knew
afterward that the desire had not been deeply rooted. Once he
dreamt that it had come true and woke up in a cold panic, for in
his dream she had been a silly, flaxen Clara, with the gold gone
out of her hair and platitudes falling insipidly from her
changeling tongue. But she was the first fine woman he ever knew
and one of the few good people who ever interested him. She made
her goodness such an asset. Amory had decided that most good
people either dragged theirs after them as a liability, or else