This Side of Paradise
Bethmann-Hollweg were mutual heirs of progress if only in
agreeing against the ducking of witches—waiving the antitheses
and approaching individually these men who seemed to be the
leaders, he was repelled by the discrepancies and contradictions
in the men themselves.
There was, for example, Thornton Hancock, respected by half the
intellectual world as an authority on life, a man who had
verified and believed the code he lived by, an educator of
educators, an adviser to Presidents—yet Amory knew that this man
had, in his heart, leaned on the priest of another religion.
And Monsignor, upon whom a cardinal rested, had moments of
strange and horrible insecurity—inexplicable in a religion that
explained even disbelief in terms of its own faith: if you
doubted the devil it was the devil that made you doubt him. Amory
had seen Monsignor go to the houses of stolid philistines, read
popular novels furiously, saturate himself in routine, to escape
from that horror.
And this priest, a little wiser, somewhat purer, had been, Amory
knew, not essentially older than he.
Amory was alone—he had escaped from a small enclosure into a
great labyrinth. He was where Goethe was when he began “Faust”;
he was where Conrad was when he wrote “Almayer’s Folly.”
Amory said to himself that there were essentially two sorts of
people who through natural clarity or disillusion left the
enclosure and sought the labyrinth. There were men like Wells and
Plato, who had, half unconsciously, a strange, hidden orthodoxy,
who would accept for themselves only what could be accepted for
all men—incurable romanticists who never, for all their efforts,
could enter the labyrinth as stark souls; there were on the other
hand sword-like pioneering personalities, Samuel Butler, Renan,
Voltaire, who progressed much slower, yet eventually much
further, not in the direct pessimistic line of speculative
philosophy but concerned in the eternal attempt to attach a
positive value to life....
Amory stopped. He began for the first time in his life to have a
strong distrust of all generalities and epigrams. They were too
easy, too dangerous to the public mind. Yet all thought usually
reached the public after thirty years in some such form: Benson
and Chesterton had popularized Huysmans and Newman; Shaw had
sugar-coated Nietzsche and Ibsen and Schopenhauer. The man in the
street heard the conclusions of dead genius through some one
else’s clever paradoxes and didactic epigrams.
Life was a damned muddle... a football game with every one
off-side and the referee gotten rid of—every one claiming the
referee would have been on his side....
Progress was a labyrinth... people plunging blindly in and then
rushing wildly back, shouting that they had found it... the
invisible king—the elan vital—the principle of evolution...
writing a book, starting a war, founding a school....
Amory, even had he not been a selfish man, would have started all
inquiries with himself. He was his own best example—sitting in
the rain, a human creature of sex and pride, foiled by chance and
his own temperament of the balm of love and children, preserved
to help in building up the living consciousness of the race.
In self-reproach and loneliness and disillusion he came to the
entrance of the labyrinth.
Another dawn flung itself across the river, a belated taxi
hurried along the street, its lamps still shining like burning
eyes in a face white from a night’s carouse. A melancholy siren
sounded far down the river.
MONSIGNOR
Amory kept thinking how Monsignor would have enjoyed his own
funeral. It was magnificently Catholic and liturgical. Bishop
O’Neill sang solemn high mass and the cardinal gave the final
absolutions. Thornton Hancock, Mrs. Lawrence, the British and
Italian ambassadors, the papal delegate, and a host of friends
and priests were there—yet the inexorable shears had cut through
all these threads that Monsignor had gathered into his hands. To
Amory it was a haunting grief to see him lying in his coffin,
with closed hands upon his purple vestments. His face had not
changed, and, as he never knew he was dying, it showed no pain or
fear. It was Amory’s dear old friend, his and the others’—for the
church was full of people with daft, staring faces, the most
exalted seeming the most stricken.
The cardinal, like an archangel in cope and mitre, sprinkled the
holy water; the organ broke into sound; the choir began to sing
the Requiem Eternam.
All these people grieved because they had to some extent depended
upon Monsignor. Their grief was more than sentiment for the
“crack in his voice or a certain break in his walk,” as Wells put
it. These people had leaned on Monsignor’s faith, his way of
finding cheer, of making religion a thing of lights and shadows,
making all light and shadow merely aspects of God. People felt
safe when he was near.
Of Amory’s attempted sacrifice had been born merely the full
realization of his disillusion, but of Monsignor’s funeral was
born the romantic elf who was to enter the labyrinth with him. He
found something that he wanted, had always wanted and always
would want—not to be admired, as he had feared; not to be loved,
as he had made himself believe; but to be necessary to people, to
be indispensable; he remembered the sense of security he had
found in Burne.
Life opened up in one of its amazing bursts of radiance and Amory
suddenly and permanently rejected an old epigram that had been
playing listlessly in his mind: “Very few things matter and
nothing matters very much.”
On the contrary, Amory felt an immense desire to give people a
sense of security.
THE BIG MAN WITH GOGGLES
On the day that Amory started on his walk to Princeton the sky
was a colorless vault, cool, high and barren of the threat of
rain. It was a gray day, that least fleshly of all weathers; a
day of dreams and far hopes and clear visions. It was a day
easily associated with those abstract truths and purities that
dissolve in the sunshine or fade out in mocking laughter by the
light of the moon. The trees and clouds were carved in classical
severity; the sounds of the countryside had harmonized to a
monotone, metallic as a trumpet, breathless as the Grecian urn.
The day had put Amory in such a contemplative mood that he caused
much annoyance to several motorists who were forced to slow up
considerably or else run him down. So engrossed in his thoughts
was he that he was scarcely surprised at that strange
phenomenon—cordiality manifested within fifty miles of
Manhattan—when a passing car slowed down beside him and a voice
hailed him. He looked up and saw a magnificent Locomobile in
which sat two middle-aged men, one of them small and anxious
looking, apparently an artificial growth on the other who was
large and begoggled and imposing.
“Do you want a lift?” asked the apparently artificial growth,
glancing from the corner of his eye at the imposing man as if for
some habitual, silent corroboration.
“You bet I do. Thanks.”
The chauffeur swung open the door, and, climbing in, Amory
settled himself in the middle of the back seat. He took in his
companions curiously. The chief characteristic of the big man
seemed to be a great confidence in himself set off against a
tremendous boredom with everything around him. That part of his
face which protruded under the goggles was what is generally
termed “strong”; rolls of not undignified fat had collected near
his chin; somewhere above was a wide thin mouth and the rough
model for a Roman nose, and, below, his shoulders collapsed
without a struggle into the powerful bulk of his chest and belly.
He was excellently and quietly dressed. Amory noticed that he was
inclined to stare straight at the back of the chauffeur’s head as
if speculating steadily but hopelessly some baffling hirsute
problem.
The smaller man was remarkable only for his complete submersion
in the personality of the other. He was of that lower secretarial
type who at forty have engraved upon their business cards:
“Assistant to the President,” and without a sigh consecrate the
rest of their lives to second-hand mannerisms.
“Going far?” asked the smaller man in a pleasant disinterested
way.
“Quite a stretch.”
“Hiking for exercise?”
“No,” responded Amory succinctly, “I’m walking because I can’t
afford to ride.”
“Oh.”
Then again:
“Are you looking for work? Because there’s lots of work,” he
continued rather testily. “All this talk of lack of work. The
West is especially short of labor.” He expressed the West with a
sweeping, lateral gesture. Amory nodded politely.
“Have you a trade?”
No—Amory had no trade.
“Clerk, eh?”
No—Amory was not a clerk.
“Whatever your line is,” said the little man, seeming to agree
wisely with something Amory had said, “now is the time of
opportunity and business openings.” He glanced again toward the
big man, as a lawyer grilling a witness glances involuntarily at
the jury.
Amory decided that he must say something and for the life of him
could think of only one thing to say.
“Of course I want a great lot of money—”
The little man laughed mirthlessly but conscientiously.
“That’s what every one wants nowadays, but they don’t want to
work for it.”
“A very natural, healthy desire. Almost all normal people want to
be rich without great effort—except the financiers in problem
plays, who want to ‘crash their way through.’ Don’t you want easy
money?”
“Of course not,” said the secretary indignantly.
“But,” continued Amory disregarding him, “being very poor at
present I am contemplating socialism as possibly my forte.”
Both men glanced at him curiously.
“These bomb throwers—” The little man ceased as words lurched
ponderously from the big man’s chest.
“If I thought you were a bomb thrower I’d run you over to the
Newark jail. That’s what I think of Socialists.”
Amory laughed.
“What are you,” asked the big man, “one of these parlor
Bolsheviks, one of these idealists? I must say I fail to see the
difference. The idealists loaf around and write the stuff that
stirs up the poor immigrants.”
“Well,” said Amory, “if being an idealist is both safe and
lucrative, I might try it.”
“What’s your difficulty? Lost your job?”
“Not exactly, but—well, call it that.”
“What was it?”
“Writing copy for an advertising agency.”
“Lots of money in advertising.”
Amory smiled discreetly.
“Oh, I’ll admit there’s money in it eventually. Talent doesn’t
starve any more. Even art gets enough to eat these days. Artists
draw your magazine covers, write your advertisements, hash out