This Side of Paradise
distorted it to artificial geniality, and of course there were
the ever-present prig and Pharisee—(but Amory never included
_them_ as being among the saved).
ST. CECILIA
“Over her gray and velvet dress, Under her molten, beaten hair,
Color of rose in mock distress Flushes and fades and makes her fair;
Fills the air from her to him With light and languor and little
sighs, Just so subtly he scarcely knows... Laughing lightning, color
of rose.”
“Do you like me?”
“Of course I do,” said Clara seriously.
“Why?”
“Well, we have some qualities in common. Things that are
spontaneous in each of us—or were originally.”
“You’re implying that I haven’t used myself very well?”
Clara hesitated.
“Well, I can’t judge. A man, of course, has to go through a lot
more, and I’ve been sheltered.”
“Oh, don’t stall, please, Clara,” Amory interrupted; “but do talk
about me a little, won’t you?”
“Surely, I’d adore to.” She didn’t smile.
“That’s sweet of you. First answer some questions. Am I painfully
conceited?”
“Well—no, you have tremendous vanity, but it’ll amuse the people
who notice its preponderance.”
“I see.”
“You’re really humble at heart. You sink to the third hell of
depression when you think you’ve been slighted. In fact, you
haven’t much self-respect.”
“Centre of target twice, Clara. How do you do it? You never let
me say a word.”
“Of course not—I can never judge a man while he’s talking. But
I’m not through; the reason you have so little real
self-confidence, even though you gravely announce to the
occasional philistine that you think you’re a genius, is that
you’ve attributed all sorts of atrocious faults to yourself and
are trying to live up to them. For instance, you’re always saying
that you are a slave to high-balls.”
“But I am, potentially.”
“And you say you’re a weak character, that you’ve no will.”
“Not a bit of will—I’m a slave to my emotions, to my likes, to my
hatred of boredom, to most of my desires—”
“You are not!” She brought one little fist down onto the other.
“You’re a slave, a bound helpless slave to one thing in the
world, your imagination.”
“You certainly interest me. If this isn’t boring you, go on.”
“I notice that when you want to stay over an extra day from
college you go about it in a sure way. You never decide at first
while the merits of going or staying are fairly clear in your
mind. You let your imagination shinny on the side of your desires
for a few hours, and then you decide. Naturally your imagination,
after a little freedom, thinks up a million reasons why you
should stay, so your decision when it comes isn’t true. It’s
biassed.”
“Yes,” objected Amory, “but isn’t it lack of will-power to let my
imagination shinny on the wrong side?”
“My dear boy, there’s your big mistake. This has nothing to do
with will-power; that’s a crazy, useless word, anyway; you lack
judgment—the judgment to decide at once when you know your
imagination will play you false, given half a chance.”
“Well, I’ll be darned!” exclaimed Amory in surprise, “that’s the
last thing I expected.”
Clara didn’t gloat. She changed the subject immediately. But she
had started him thinking and he believed she was partly right. He
felt like a factory-owner who after accusing a clerk of
dishonesty finds that his own son, in the office, is changing the
books once a week. His poor, mistreated will that he had been
holding up to the scorn of himself and his friends, stood before
him innocent, and his judgment walked off to prison with the
unconfinable imp, imagination, dancing in mocking glee beside
him. Clara’s was the only advice he ever asked without dictating
the answer himself—except, perhaps, in his talks with Monsignor
Darcy.
How he loved to do any sort of thing with Clara! Shopping with
her was a rare, epicurean dream. In every store where she had
ever traded she was whispered about as the beautiful Mrs. Page.
“I’ll bet she won’t stay single long.”
“Well, don’t scream it out. She ain’t lookin’ for no advice.”
“_Ain’t_ she beautiful!”
(Enter a floor-walker—silence till he moves forward, smirking.)
“Society person, ain’t she?”
“Yeah, but poor now, I guess; so they say.”
“Gee! girls, _ain’t_ she some kid!”
And Clara beamed on all alike. Amory believed that tradespeople
gave her discounts, sometimes to her knowledge and sometimes
without it. He knew she dressed very well, had always the best of
everything in the house, and was inevitably waited upon by the
head floor-walker at the very least.
Sometimes they would go to church together on Sunday and he would
walk beside her and revel in her cheeks moist from the soft water
in the new air. She was very devout, always had been, and God
knows what heights she attained and what strength she drew down
to herself when she knelt and bent her golden hair into the
stained-glass light.
“St. Cecelia,” he cried aloud one day, quite involuntarily, and
the people turned and peered, and the priest paused in his sermon
and Clara and Amory turned to fiery red.
That was the last Sunday they had, for he spoiled it all that
night. He couldn’t help it.
They were walking through the March twilight where it was as warm
as June, and the joy of youth filled his soul so that he felt he
must speak.
“I think,” he said and his voice trembled, “that if I lost faith
in you I’d lose faith in God.”
She looked at him with such a startled face that he asked her the
matter.
“Nothing,” she said slowly, “only this: five men have said that
to me before, and it frightens me.”
“Oh, Clara, is that your fate!”
She did not answer.
“I suppose love to you is—” he began.
She turned like a flash.
“I have never been in love.”
They walked along, and he realized slowly how much she had told
him... never in love.... She seemed suddenly a daughter of light
alone. His entity dropped out of her plane and he longed only to
touch her dress with almost the realization that Joseph must have
had of Mary’s eternal significance. But quite mechanically he
heard himself saying:
“And I love you—any latent greatness that I’ve got is... oh, I
can’t talk, but Clara, if I come back in two years in a position
to marry you—”
She shook her head.
“No,” she said; “I’d never marry again. I’ve got my two children
and I want myself for them. I like you—I like all clever men, you
more than any—but you know me well enough to know that I’d never
marry a clever man—” She broke off suddenly.
“Amory.”
“What?”
“You’re not in love with me. You never wanted to marry me, did
you?”
“It was the twilight,” he said wonderingly. “I didn’t feel as
though I were speaking aloud. But I love you—or adore you—or
worship you—”
“There you go—running through your catalogue of emotions in five
seconds.”
He smiled unwillingly.
“Don’t make me out such a light-weight, Clara; you _are_
depressing sometimes.”
“You’re not a light-weight, of all things,” she said intently,
taking his arm and opening wide her eyes—he could see their
kindliness in the fading dusk. “A light-weight is an eternal
nay.”
“There’s so much spring in the air—there’s so much lazy sweetness
in your heart.”
She dropped his arm.
“You’re all fine now, and I feel glorious. Give me a cigarette.
You’ve never seen me smoke, have you? Well, I do, about once a
month.”
And then that wonderful girl and Amory raced to the corner like
two mad children gone wild with pale-blue twilight.
“I’m going to the country for to-morrow,” she announced, as she
stood panting, safe beyond the flare of the corner lamp-post.
“These days are too magnificent to miss, though perhaps I feel
them more in the city.”
“Oh, Clara!” Amory said; “what a devil you could have been if the
Lord had just bent your soul a little the other way!”
“Maybe,” she answered; “but I think not. I’m never really wild
and never have been. That little outburst was pure spring.”
“And you are, too,” said he.
They were walking along now.
“No—you’re wrong again, how can a person of your own self-reputed
brains be so constantly wrong about me? I’m the opposite of
everything spring ever stood for. It’s unfortunate, if I happen
to look like what pleased some soppy old Greek sculptor, but I
assure you that if it weren’t for my face I’d be a quiet nun in
the convent without”—then she broke into a run and her raised
voice floated back to him as he followed—“my precious babies,
which I must go back and see.”
She was the only girl he ever knew with whom he could understand
how another man might be preferred. Often Amory met wives whom he
had known as debutantes, and looking intently at them imagined
that he found something in their faces which said:
“Oh, if I could only have gotten _you!_” Oh, the enormous conceit
of the man!
But that night seemed a night of stars and singing and Clara’s
bright soul still gleamed on the ways they had trod.
“Golden, golden is the air—” he chanted to the little pools of
water. ... “Golden is the air, golden notes from golden
mandolins, golden frets of golden violins, fair, oh, wearily
fair.... Skeins from braided basket, mortals may not hold; oh,
what young extravagant God, who would know or ask it?... who
could give such gold...”
AMORY IS RESENTFUL
Slowly and inevitably, yet with a sudden surge at the last, while
Amory talked and dreamed, war rolled swiftly up the beach and
washed the sands where Princeton played. Every night the
gymnasium echoed as platoon after platoon swept over the floor
and shuffled out the basket-ball markings. When Amory went to
Washington the next week-end he caught some of the spirit of
crisis which changed to repulsion in the Pullman car coming back,
for the berths across from him were occupied by stinking
aliens—Greeks, he guessed, or Russians. He thought how much
easier patriotism had been to a homogeneous race, how much easier
it would have been to fight as the Colonies fought, or as the
Confederacy fought. And he did no sleeping that night, but
listened to the aliens guffaw and snore while they filled the car
with the heavy scent of latest America.
In Princeton every one bantered in public and told themselves
privately that their deaths at least would be heroic. The
literary students read Rupert Brooke passionately; the
lounge-lizards worried over whether the government would permit
the English-cut uniform for officers; a few of the hopelessly
lazy wrote to the obscure branches of the War Department, seeking
an easy commission and a soft berth.
Then, after a week, Amory saw Burne and knew at once that