This Side of Paradise
Tattler: it puzzled him to see impressionable small boys
imitating the very vanities that had not long ago been
contemptible weaknesses.
After the football season he slumped into dreamy content. The
night of the pre-holiday dance he slipped away and went early to
bed for the pleasure of hearing the violin music cross the grass
and come surging in at his window. Many nights he lay there
dreaming awake of secret cafes in Mont Martre, where ivory women
delved in romantic mysteries with diplomats and soldiers of
fortune, while orchestras played Hungarian waltzes and the air
was thick and exotic with intrigue and moonlight and adventure.
In the spring he read “L’Allegro,” by request, and was inspired
to lyrical outpourings on the subject of Arcady and the pipes of
Pan. He moved his bed so that the sun would wake him at dawn that
he might dress and go out to the archaic swing that hung from an
apple-tree near the sixth-form house. Seating himself in this he
would pump higher and higher until he got the effect of swinging
into the wide air, into a fairyland of piping satyrs and nymphs
with the faces of fair-haired girls he passed in the streets of
Eastchester. As the swing reached its highest point, Arcady
really lay just over the brow of a certain hill, where the brown
road dwindled out of sight in a golden dot.
He read voluminously all spring, the beginning of his eighteenth
year: “The Gentleman from Indiana,” “The New Arabian Nights,”
“The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne,” “The Man Who Was Thursday,” which
he liked without understanding; “Stover at Yale,” that became
somewhat of a text-book; “Dombey and Son,” because he thought he
really should read better stuff; Robert Chambers, David Graham
Phillips, and E. Phillips Oppenheim complete, and a scattering of
Tennyson and Kipling. Of all his class work only “L’Allegro” and
some quality of rigid clarity in solid geometry stirred his
languid interest.
As June drew near, he felt the need of conversation to formulate
his own ideas, and, to his surprise, found a co-philosopher in
Rahill, the president of the sixth form. In many a talk, on the
highroad or lying belly-down along the edge of the baseball
diamond, or late at night with their cigarettes glowing in the
dark, they threshed out the questions of school, and there was
developed the term “slicker.”
“Got tobacco?” whispered Rahill one night, putting his head
inside the door five minutes after lights.
“Sure.”
“I’m coming in.”
“Take a couple of pillows and lie in the window-seat, why don’t
you.”
Amory sat up in bed and lit a cigarette while Rahill settled for
a conversation. Rahill’s favorite subject was the respective
futures of the sixth form, and Amory never tired of outlining
them for his benefit.
“Ted Converse? ’At’s easy. He’ll fail his exams, tutor all summer
at Harstrum’s, get into Sheff with about four conditions, and
flunk out in the middle of the freshman year. Then he’ll go back
West and raise hell for a year or so; finally his father will
make him go into the paint business. He’ll marry and have four
sons, all bone heads. He’ll always think St. Regis’s spoiled him,
so he’ll send his sons to day school in Portland. He’ll die of
locomotor ataxia when he’s forty-one, and his wife will give a
baptizing stand or whatever you call it to the Presbyterian
Church, with his name on it—”
“Hold up, Amory. That’s too darned gloomy. How about yourself?”
“I’m in a superior class. You are, too. We’re philosophers.”
“I’m not.”
“Sure you are. You’ve got a darn good head on you.” But Amory
knew that nothing in the abstract, no theory or generality, ever
moved Rahill until he stubbed his toe upon the concrete minutiae
of it.
“Haven’t,” insisted Rahill. “I let people impose on me here and
don’t get anything out of it. I’m the prey of my friends, damn
it—do their lessons, get ’em out of trouble, pay ’em stupid
summer visits, and always entertain their kid sisters; keep my
temper when they get selfish and then they think they pay me back
by voting for me and telling me I’m the ‘big man’ of St. Regis’s.
I want to get where everybody does their own work and I can tell
people where to go. I’m tired of being nice to every poor fish in
school.”
“You’re not a slicker,” said Amory suddenly.
“A what?”
“A slicker.”
“What the devil’s that?”
“Well, it’s something that—that—there’s a lot of them. You’re not
one, and neither am I, though I am more than you are.”
“Who is one? What makes you one?”
Amory considered.
“Why—why, I suppose that the _sign_ of it is when a fellow slicks
his hair back with water.”
“Like Carstairs?”
“Yes—sure. He’s a slicker.”
They spent two evenings getting an exact definition. The slicker
was good-looking or clean-looking; he had brains, social brains,
that is, and he used all means on the broad path of honesty to
get ahead, be popular, admired, and never in trouble. He dressed
well, was particularly neat in appearance, and derived his name
from the fact that his hair was inevitably worn short, soaked in
water or tonic, parted in the middle, and slicked back as the
current of fashion dictated. The slickers of that year had
adopted tortoise-shell spectacles as badges of their slickerhood,
and this made them so easy to recognize that Amory and Rahill
never missed one. The slicker seemed distributed through school,
always a little wiser and shrewder than his contemporaries,
managing some team or other, and keeping his cleverness carefully
concealed.
Amory found the slicker a most valuable classification until his
junior year in college, when the outline became so blurred and
indeterminate that it had to be subdivided many times, and became
only a quality. Amory’s secret ideal had all the slicker
qualifications, but, in addition, courage and tremendous brains
and talents—also Amory conceded him a bizarre streak that was
quite irreconcilable to the slicker proper.
This was a first real break from the hypocrisy of school
tradition. The slicker was a definite element of success,
differing intrinsically from the prep school “big man.”
“THE SLICKER”
1. Clever sense of social values.
2. Dresses well. Pretends that dress is superficial—but knows that it
isn’t.
3. Goes into such activities as he can shine in.
4. Gets to college and is, in a worldly way, successful.
5. Hair slicked.
“THE BIG MAN”
1. Inclined to stupidity and unconscious of social values.
2. Thinks dress is superficial, and is inclined to be careless about
it.
3. Goes out for everything from a sense of duty.
4. Gets to college and has a problematical future. Feels lost without
his circle, and always says that school days were happiest, after all.
Goes back to school and makes speeches about what St. Regis’s boys
are doing.
5. Hair not slicked.
Amory had decided definitely on Princeton, even though he would
be the only boy entering that year from St. Regis’. Yale had a
romance and glamour from the tales of Minneapolis, and St. Regis’
men who had been “tapped for Skull and Bones,” but Princeton drew
him most, with its atmosphere of bright colors and its alluring
reputation as the pleasantest country club in America. Dwarfed by
the menacing college exams, Amory’s school days drifted into the
past. Years afterward, when he went back to St. Regis’, he seemed
to have forgotten the successes of sixth-form year, and to be
able to picture himself only as the unadjustable boy who had
hurried down corridors, jeered at by his rabid contemporaries mad
with common sense.
CHAPTER 2. Spires and Gargoyles
At first Amory noticed only the wealth of sunshine creeping
across the long, green swards, dancing on the leaded
window-panes, and swimming around the tops of spires and towers
and battlemented walls. Gradually he realized that he was really
walking up University Place, self-conscious about his suitcase,
developing a new tendency to glare straight ahead when he passed
any one. Several times he could have sworn that men turned to
look at him critically. He wondered vaguely if there was
something the matter with his clothes, and wished he had shaved
that morning on the train. He felt unnecessarily stiff and
awkward among these white-flannelled, bareheaded youths, who must
be juniors and seniors, judging from the savoir faire with which
they strolled.
He found that 12 University Place was a large, dilapidated
mansion, at present apparently uninhabited, though he knew it
housed usually a dozen freshmen. After a hurried skirmish with
his landlady he sallied out on a tour of exploration, but he had
gone scarcely a block when he became horribly conscious that he
must be the only man in town who was wearing a hat. He returned
hurriedly to 12 University, left his derby, and, emerging
bareheaded, loitered down Nassau Street, stopping to investigate
a display of athletic photographs in a store window, including a
large one of Allenby, the football captain, and next attracted by
the sign “Jigger Shop” over a confectionary window. This sounded
familiar, so he sauntered in and took a seat on a high stool.
“Chocolate sundae,” he told a colored person.
“Double chocolate jiggah? Anything else?”
“Why—yes.”
“Bacon bun?”
“Why—yes.”
He munched four of these, finding them of pleasing savor, and
then consumed another double-chocolate jigger before ease
descended upon him. After a cursory inspection of the
pillow-cases, leather pennants, and Gibson Girls that lined the
walls, he left, and continued along Nassau Street with his hands
in his pockets. Gradually he was learning to distinguish between
upper classmen and entering men, even though the freshman cap
would not appear until the following Monday. Those who were too
obviously, too nervously at home were freshmen, for as each train
brought a new contingent it was immediately absorbed into the
hatless, white-shod, book-laden throng, whose function seemed to
be to drift endlessly up and down the street, emitting great
clouds of smoke from brand-new pipes. By afternoon Amory realized
that now the newest arrivals were taking him for an upper
classman, and he tried conscientiously to look both pleasantly
blasé and casually critical, which was as near as he could
analyze the prevalent facial expression.
At five o’clock he felt the need of hearing his own voice, so he
retreated to his house to see if any one else had arrived. Having
climbed the rickety stairs he scrutinized his room resignedly,
concluding that it was hopeless to attempt any more inspired
decoration than class banners and tiger pictures. There was a tap
at the door.
“Come in!”
A slim face with gray eyes and a humorous smile appeared in the
doorway.
“Got a hammer?”