This Side of Paradise
flower-beds and were silhouetted suddenly at night against the
darkening trees. It was on one of the shadowy paths that Beatrice
at last captured Amory, after Mr. Blaine had, as usual, retired
for the evening to his private library. After reproving him for
avoiding her, she took him for a long tete-a-tete in the
moonlight. He could not reconcile himself to her beauty, that was
mother to his own, the exquisite neck and shoulders, the grace of
a fortunate woman of thirty.
“Amory, dear,” she crooned softly, “I had such a strange, weird
time after I left you.”
“Did you, Beatrice?”
“When I had my last breakdown”—she spoke of it as a sturdy,
gallant feat.
“The doctors told me”—her voice sang on a confidential note—“that
if any man alive had done the consistent drinking that I have, he
would have been physically _shattered_, my dear, and in his
_grave_—long in his grave.”
Amory winced, and wondered how this would have sounded to Froggy
Parker.
“Yes,” continued Beatrice tragically, “I had dreams—wonderful
visions.” She pressed the palms of her hands into her eyes. “I
saw bronze rivers lapping marble shores, and great birds that
soared through the air, parti-colored birds with iridescent
plumage. I heard strange music and the flare of barbaric
trumpets—what?”
Amory had snickered.
“What, Amory?”
“I said go on, Beatrice.”
“That was all—it merely recurred and recurred—gardens that
flaunted coloring against which this would be quite dull, moons
that whirled and swayed, paler than winter moons, more golden
than harvest moons—”
“Are you quite well now, Beatrice?”
“Quite well—as well as I will ever be. I am not understood,
Amory. I know that can’t express it to you, Amory, but—I am not
understood.”
Amory was quite moved. He put his arm around his mother, rubbing
his head gently against her shoulder.
“Poor Beatrice—poor Beatrice.”
“Tell me about _you_, Amory. Did you have two _horrible_ years?”
Amory considered lying, and then decided against it.
“No, Beatrice. I enjoyed them. I adapted myself to the
bourgeoisie. I became conventional.” He surprised himself by
saying that, and he pictured how Froggy would have gaped.
“Beatrice,” he said suddenly, “I want to go away to school.
Everybody in Minneapolis is going to go away to school.”
Beatrice showed some alarm.
“But you’re only fifteen.”
“Yes, but everybody goes away to school at fifteen, and I _want_
to, Beatrice.”
On Beatrice’s suggestion the subject was dropped for the rest of
the walk, but a week later she delighted him by saying:
“Amory, I have decided to let you have your way. If you still
want to, you can go to school.”
“Yes?”
“To St. Regis’s in Connecticut.”
Amory felt a quick excitement.
“It’s being arranged,” continued Beatrice. “It’s better that you
should go away. I’d have preferred you to have gone to Eton, and
then to Christ Church, Oxford, but it seems impracticable now—and
for the present we’ll let the university question take care of
itself.”
“What are you going to do, Beatrice?”
“Heaven knows. It seems my fate to fret away my years in this
country. Not for a second do I regret being American—indeed, I
think that a regret typical of very vulgar people, and I feel
sure we are the great coming nation—yet”—and she sighed—“I feel
my life should have drowsed away close to an older, mellower
civilization, a land of greens and autumnal browns—”
Amory did not answer, so his mother continued:
“My regret is that you haven’t been abroad, but still, as you are
a man, it’s better that you should grow up here under the
snarling eagle—is that the right term?”
Amory agreed that it was. She would not have appreciated the
Japanese invasion.
“When do I go to school?”
“Next month. You’ll have to start East a little early to take
your examinations. After that you’ll have a free week, so I want
you to go up the Hudson and pay a visit.”
“To who?”
“To Monsignor Darcy, Amory. He wants to see you. He went to
Harrow and then to Yale—became a Catholic. I want him to talk to
you—I feel he can be such a help—” She stroked his auburn hair
gently. “Dear Amory, dear Amory—”
“Dear Beatrice—”
So early in September Amory, provided with “six suits summer
underwear, six suits winter underwear, one sweater or T shirt,
one jersey, one overcoat, winter, etc.,” set out for New England,
the land of schools.
There were Andover and Exeter with their memories of New England
dead—large, college-like democracies; St. Mark’s, Groton, St.
Regis’—recruited from Boston and the Knickerbocker families of
New York; St. Paul’s, with its great rinks; Pomfret and St.
George’s, prosperous and well-dressed; Taft and Hotchkiss, which
prepared the wealth of the Middle West for social success at
Yale; Pawling, Westminster, Choate, Kent, and a hundred others;
all milling out their well-set-up, conventional, impressive type,
year after year; their mental stimulus the college entrance
exams; their vague purpose set forth in a hundred circulars as
“To impart a Thorough Mental, Moral, and Physical Training as a
Christian Gentleman, to fit the boy for meeting the problems of
his day and generation, and to give a solid foundation in the
Arts and Sciences.”
At St. Regis’ Amory stayed three days and took his exams with a
scoffing confidence, then doubling back to New York to pay his
tutelary visit. The metropolis, barely glimpsed, made little
impression on him, except for the sense of cleanliness he drew
from the tall white buildings seen from a Hudson River steamboat
in the early morning. Indeed, his mind was so crowded with dreams
of athletic prowess at school that he considered this visit only
as a rather tiresome prelude to the great adventure. This,
however, it did not prove to be.
Monsignor Darcy’s house was an ancient, rambling structure set on
a hill overlooking the river, and there lived its owner, between
his trips to all parts of the Roman-Catholic world, rather like
an exiled Stuart king waiting to be called to the rule of his
land. Monsignor was forty-four then, and bustling—a trifle too
stout for symmetry, with hair the color of spun gold, and a
brilliant, enveloping personality. When he came into a room clad
in his full purple regalia from thatch to toe, he resembled a
Turner sunset, and attracted both admiration and attention. He
had written two novels: one of them violently anti-Catholic, just
before his conversion, and five years later another, in which he
had attempted to turn all his clever jibes against Catholics into
even cleverer innuendoes against Episcopalians. He was intensely
ritualistic, startlingly dramatic, loved the idea of God enough
to be a celibate, and rather liked his neighbor.
Children adored him because he was like a child; youth revelled
in his company because he was still a youth, and couldn’t be
shocked. In the proper land and century he might have been a
Richelieu—at present he was a very moral, very religious (if not
particularly pious) clergyman, making a great mystery about
pulling rusty wires, and appreciating life to the fullest, if not
entirely enjoying it.
He and Amory took to each other at first sight—the jovial,
impressive prelate who could dazzle an embassy ball, and the
green-eyed, intent youth, in his first long trousers, accepted in
their own minds a relation of father and son within a half-hour’s
conversation.
“My dear boy, I’ve been waiting to see you for years. Take a big
chair and we’ll have a chat.”
“I’ve just come from school—St. Regis’s, you know.”
“So your mother says—a remarkable woman; have a cigarette—I’m
sure you smoke. Well, if you’re like me, you loathe all science
and mathematics—”
Amory nodded vehemently.
“Hate ’em all. Like English and history.”
“Of course. You’ll hate school for a while, too, but I’m glad
you’re going to St. Regis’s.”
“Why?”
“Because it’s a gentleman’s school, and democracy won’t hit you
so early. You’ll find plenty of that in college.”
“I want to go to Princeton,” said Amory. “I don’t know why, but I
think of all Harvard men as sissies, like I used to be, and all
Yale men as wearing big blue sweaters and smoking pipes.”
Monsignor chuckled.
“I’m one, you know.”
“Oh, you’re different—I think of Princeton as being lazy and
good-looking and aristocratic—you know, like a spring day.
Harvard seems sort of indoors—”
“And Yale is November, crisp and energetic,” finished Monsignor.
“That’s it.”
They slipped briskly into an intimacy from which they never
recovered.
“I was for Bonnie Prince Charlie,” announced Amory.
“Of course you were—and for Hannibal—”
“Yes, and for the Southern Confederacy.” He was rather sceptical
about being an Irish patriot—he suspected that being Irish was
being somewhat common—but Monsignor assured him that Ireland was
a romantic lost cause and Irish people quite charming, and that
it should, by all means, be one of his principal biasses.
After a crowded hour which included several more cigarettes, and
during which Monsignor learned, to his surprise but not to his
horror, that Amory had not been brought up a Catholic, he
announced that he had another guest. This turned out to be the
Honorable Thornton Hancock, of Boston, ex-minister to The Hague,
author of an erudite history of the Middle Ages and the last of a
distinguished, patriotic, and brilliant family.
“He comes here for a rest,” said Monsignor confidentially,
treating Amory as a contemporary. “I act as an escape from the
weariness of agnosticism, and I think I’m the only man who knows
how his staid old mind is really at sea and longs for a sturdy
spar like the Church to cling to.”
Their first luncheon was one of the memorable events of Amory’s
early life. He was quite radiant and gave off a peculiar
brightness and charm. Monsignor called out the best that he had
thought by question and suggestion, and Amory talked with an
ingenious brilliance of a thousand impulses and desires and
repulsions and faiths and fears. He and Monsignor held the floor,
and the older man, with his less receptive, less accepting, yet
certainly not colder mentality, seemed content to listen and bask
in the mellow sunshine that played between these two. Monsignor
gave the effect of sunlight to many people; Amory gave it in his
youth and, to some extent, when he was very much older, but never
again was it quite so mutually spontaneous.
“He’s a radiant boy,” thought Thornton Hancock, who had seen the
splendor of two continents and talked with Parnell and Gladstone
and Bismarck—and afterward he added to Monsignor: “But his