This Side of Paradise
trembling, “and Froggy Parker twenty-sixth.”
Froggy had fallen twenty-five places in one hour. As yet he had
not even noticed it.
But Amory, being on the spot, leaned over quickly and kissed
Myra’s cheek. He had never kissed a girl before, and he tasted
his lips curiously, as if he had munched some new fruit. Then
their lips brushed like young wild flowers in the wind.
“We’re awful,” rejoiced Myra gently. She slipped her hand into
his, her head drooped against his shoulder. Sudden revulsion
seized Amory, disgust, loathing for the whole incident. He
desired frantically to be away, never to see Myra again, never to
kiss any one; he became conscious of his face and hers, of their
clinging hands, and he wanted to creep out of his body and hide
somewhere safe out of sight, up in the corner of his mind.
“Kiss me again.” Her voice came out of a great void.
“I don’t want to,” he heard himself saying. There was another
pause.
“I don’t want to!” he repeated passionately.
Myra sprang up, her cheeks pink with bruised vanity, the great
bow on the back of her head trembling sympathetically.
“I hate you!” she cried. “Don’t you ever dare to speak to me
again!”
“What?” stammered Amory.
“I’ll tell mama you kissed me! I will too! I will too! I’ll tell
mama, and she won’t let me play with you!”
Amory rose and stared at her helplessly, as though she were a new
animal of whose presence on the earth he had not heretofore been
aware.
The door opened suddenly, and Myra’s mother appeared on the
threshold, fumbling with her lorgnette.
“Well,” she began, adjusting it benignantly, “the man at the desk
told me you two children were up here—How do you do, Amory.”
Amory watched Myra and waited for the crash—but none came. The
pout faded, the high pink subsided, and Myra’s voice was placid
as a summer lake when she answered her mother.
“Oh, we started so late, mama, that I thought we might as well—”
He heard from below the shrieks of laughter, and smelled the
vapid odor of hot chocolate and tea-cakes as he silently followed
mother and daughter down-stairs. The sound of the graphophone
mingled with the voices of many girls humming the air, and a
faint glow was born and spread over him:
“Casey-Jones—mounted to the cab-un Casey-Jones—’th his orders in his
hand. Casey-Jones—mounted to the cab-un Took his farewell journey to
the prom-ised land.”
SNAPSHOTS OF THE YOUNG EGOTIST
Amory spent nearly two years in Minneapolis. The first winter he
wore moccasins that were born yellow, but after many applications
of oil and dirt assumed their mature color, a dirty, greenish
brown; he wore a gray plaid mackinaw coat, and a red toboggan
cap. His dog, Count Del Monte, ate the red cap, so his uncle gave
him a gray one that pulled down over his face. The trouble with
this one was that you breathed into it and your breath froze; one
day the darn thing froze his cheek. He rubbed snow on his cheek,
but it turned bluish-black just the same.
The Count Del Monte ate a box of bluing once, but it didn’t hurt
him. Later, however, he lost his mind and ran madly up the
street, bumping into fences, rolling in gutters, and pursuing his
eccentric course out of Amory’s life. Amory cried on his bed.
“Poor little Count,” he cried. “Oh, _poor_ little _Count!_”
After several months he suspected Count of a fine piece of
emotional acting.
Amory and Frog Parker considered that the greatest line in
literature occurred in Act III of “Arsene Lupin.”
They sat in the first row at the Wednesday and Saturday matinees.
The line was:
“If one can’t be a great artist or a great soldier, the next best
thing is to be a great criminal.”
Amory fell in love again, and wrote a poem. This was it:
“Marylyn and Sallee, Those are the girls for me. Marylyn stands
above Sallee in that sweet, deep love.”
He was interested in whether McGovern of Minnesota would make the
first or second All-American, how to do the card-pass, how to do
the coin-pass, chameleon ties, how babies were born, and whether
Three-fingered Brown was really a better pitcher than Christie
Mathewson.
Among other things he read: “For the Honor of the School,”
“Little Women” (twice), “The Common Law,” “Sapho,” “Dangerous Dan
McGrew,” “The Broad Highway” (three times), “The Fall of the
House of Usher,” “Three Weeks,” “Mary Ware, the Little Colonel’s
Chum,” “Gunga Din,” The Police Gazette, and Jim-Jam Jems.
He had all the Henty biasses in history, and was particularly
fond of the cheerful murder stories of Mary Roberts Rinehart.
School ruined his French and gave him a distaste for standard
authors. His masters considered him idle, unreliable and
superficially clever.
He collected locks of hair from many girls. He wore the rings of
several. Finally he could borrow no more rings, owing to his
nervous habit of chewing them out of shape. This, it seemed,
usually aroused the jealous suspicions of the next borrower.
All through the summer months Amory and Frog Parker went each
week to the Stock Company. Afterward they would stroll home in
the balmy air of August night, dreaming along Hennepin and
Nicollet Avenues, through the gay crowd. Amory wondered how
people could fail to notice that he was a boy marked for glory,
and when faces of the throng turned toward him and ambiguous eyes
stared into his, he assumed the most romantic of expressions and
walked on the air cushions that lie on the asphalts of fourteen.
Always, after he was in bed, there were voices—indefinite,
fading, enchanting—just outside his window, and before he fell
asleep he would dream one of his favorite waking dreams, the one
about becoming a great half-back, or the one about the Japanese
invasion, when he was rewarded by being made the youngest general
in the world. It was always the becoming he dreamed of, never the
being. This, too, was quite characteristic of Amory.
CODE OF THE YOUNG EGOTIST
Before he was summoned back to Lake Geneva, he had appeared, shy
but inwardly glowing, in his first long trousers, set off by a
purple accordion tie and a “Belmont” collar with the edges
unassailably meeting, purple socks, and handkerchief with a
purple border peeping from his breast pocket. But more than that,
he had formulated his first philosophy, a code to live by, which,
as near as it can be named, was a sort of aristocratic egotism.
He had realized that his best interests were bound up with those
of a certain variant, changing person, whose label, in order that
his past might always be identified with him, was Amory Blaine.
Amory marked himself a fortunate youth, capable of infinite
expansion for good or evil. He did not consider himself a “strong
char’c’ter,” but relied on his facility (learn things sorta
quick) and his superior mentality (read a lotta deep books). He
was proud of the fact that he could never become a mechanical or
scientific genius. From no other heights was he debarred.
Physically.—Amory thought that he was exceedingly handsome. He
was. He fancied himself an athlete of possibilities and a supple
dancer.
Socially.—Here his condition was, perhaps, most dangerous. He
granted himself personality, charm, magnetism, poise, the power
of dominating all contemporary males, the gift of fascinating all
women.
Mentally.—Complete, unquestioned superiority.
Now a confession will have to be made. Amory had rather a Puritan
conscience. Not that he yielded to it—later in life he almost
completely slew it—but at fifteen it made him consider himself a
great deal worse than other boys... unscrupulousness... the
desire to influence people in almost every way, even for evil...
a certain coldness and lack of affection, amounting sometimes to
cruelty... a shifting sense of honor... an unholy selfishness...
a puzzled, furtive interest in everything concerning sex.
There was, also, a curious strain of weakness running crosswise
through his make-up... a harsh phrase from the lips of an older
boy (older boys usually detested him) was liable to sweep him off
his poise into surly sensitiveness, or timid stupidity... he was
a slave to his own moods and he felt that though he was capable
of recklessness and audacity, he possessed neither courage,
perseverance, nor self-respect.
Vanity, tempered with self-suspicion if not self-knowledge, a
sense of people as automatons to his will, a desire to “pass” as
many boys as possible and get to a vague top of the world... with
this background did Amory drift into adolescence.
PREPARATORY TO THE GREAT ADVENTURE
The train slowed up with midsummer languor at Lake Geneva, and
Amory caught sight of his mother waiting in her electric on the
gravelled station drive. It was an ancient electric, one of the
early types, and painted gray. The sight of her sitting there,
slenderly erect, and of her face, where beauty and dignity
combined, melting to a dreamy recollected smile, filled him with
a sudden great pride of her. As they kissed coolly and he stepped
into the electric, he felt a quick fear lest he had lost the
requisite charm to measure up to her.
“Dear boy—you’re _so_ tall... look behind and see if there’s
anything coming...”
She looked left and right, she slipped cautiously into a speed of
two miles an hour, beseeching Amory to act as sentinel; and at
one busy crossing she made him get out and run ahead to signal
her forward like a traffic policeman. Beatrice was what might be
termed a careful driver.
“You _are_ tall—but you’re still very handsome—you’ve skipped the
awkward age, or is that sixteen; perhaps it’s fourteen or
fifteen; I can never remember; but you’ve skipped it.”
“Don’t embarrass me,” murmured Amory.
“But, my dear boy, what odd clothes! They look as if they were a
_set_—don’t they? Is your underwear purple, too?”
Amory grunted impolitely.
“You must go to Brooks’ and get some really nice suits. Oh, we’ll
have a talk to-night or perhaps to-morrow night. I want to tell
you about your heart—you’ve probably been neglecting your
heart—and you don’t _know_.”
Amory thought how superficial was the recent overlay of his own
generation. Aside from a minute shyness, he felt that the old
cynical kinship with his mother had not been one bit broken. Yet
for the first few days he wandered about the gardens and along
the shore in a state of superloneliness, finding a lethargic
content in smoking “Bull” at the garage with one of the
chauffeurs.
The sixty acres of the estate were dotted with old and new summer
houses and many fountains and white benches that came suddenly
into sight from foliage-hung hiding-places; there was a great and
constantly increasing family of white cats that prowled the many