This Side of Paradise
“No—sorry. Maybe Mrs. Twelve, or whatever she goes by, has one.”
The stranger advanced into the room.
“You an inmate of this asylum?”
Amory nodded.
“Awful barn for the rent we pay.”
Amory had to agree that it was.
“I thought of the campus,” he said, “but they say there’s so few
freshmen that they’re lost. Have to sit around and study for
something to do.”
The gray-eyed man decided to introduce himself.
“My name’s Holiday.”
“Blaine’s my name.”
They shook hands with the fashionable low swoop. Amory grinned.
“Where’d you prep?”
“Andover—where did you?”
“St. Regis’s.”
“Oh, did you? I had a cousin there.”
They discussed the cousin thoroughly, and then Holiday announced
that he was to meet his brother for dinner at six.
“Come along and have a bite with us.”
“All right.”
At the Kenilworth Amory met Burne Holiday—he of the gray eyes was
Kerry—and during a limpid meal of thin soup and anaemic
vegetables they stared at the other freshmen, who sat either in
small groups looking very ill at ease, or in large groups seeming
very much at home.
“I hear Commons is pretty bad,” said Amory.
“That’s the rumor. But you’ve got to eat there—or pay anyways.”
“Crime!”
“Imposition!”
“Oh, at Princeton you’ve got to swallow everything the first
year. It’s like a damned prep school.”
Amory agreed.
“Lot of pep, though,” he insisted. “I wouldn’t have gone to Yale
for a million.”
“Me either.”
“You going out for anything?” inquired Amory of the elder
brother.
“Not me—Burne here is going out for the Prince—the Daily
Princetonian, you know.”
“Yes, I know.”
“You going out for anything?”
“Why—yes. I’m going to take a whack at freshman football.”
“Play at St. Regis’s?”
“Some,” admitted Amory depreciatingly, “but I’m getting so damned
thin.”
“You’re not thin.”
“Well, I used to be stocky last fall.”
“Oh!”
After supper they attended the movies, where Amory was fascinated
by the glib comments of a man in front of him, as well as by the
wild yelling and shouting.
“Yoho!”
“Oh, honey-baby—you’re so big and strong, but oh, so gentle!”
“Clinch!”
“Oh, Clinch!”
“Kiss her, kiss ’at lady, quick!”
“Oh-h-h—!”
A group began whistling “By the Sea,” and the audience took it up
noisily. This was followed by an indistinguishable song that
included much stamping and then by an endless, incoherent dirge.
“Oh-h-h-h-h She works in a Jam Factoree And—that-may-be-all-right
But you can’t-fool-me For I know—DAMN—WELL That she
DON’T-make-jam-all-night! Oh-h-h-h!”
As they pushed out, giving and receiving curious impersonal
glances, Amory decided that he liked the movies, wanted to enjoy
them as the row of upper classmen in front had enjoyed them, with
their arms along the backs of the seats, their comments Gaelic
and caustic, their attitude a mixture of critical wit and
tolerant amusement.
“Want a sundae—I mean a jigger?” asked Kerry.
“Sure.”
They suppered heavily and then, still sauntering, eased back to
12.
“Wonderful night.”
“It’s a whiz.”
“You men going to unpack?”
“Guess so. Come on, Burne.”
Amory decided to sit for a while on the front steps, so he bade
them good night.
The great tapestries of trees had darkened to ghosts back at the
last edge of twilight. The early moon had drenched the arches
with pale blue, and, weaving over the night, in and out of the
gossamer rifts of moon, swept a song, a song with more than a
hint of sadness, infinitely transient, infinitely regretful.
He remembered that an alumnus of the nineties had told him of one
of Booth Tarkington’s amusements: standing in mid-campus in the
small hours and singing tenor songs to the stars, arousing
mingled emotions in the couched undergraduates according to the
sentiment of their moods.
Now, far down the shadowy line of University Place a white-clad
phalanx broke the gloom, and marching figures, white-shirted,
white-trousered, swung rhythmically up the street, with linked
arms and heads thrown back:
“Going back—going back, Going—back—to—Nas-sau—Hall, Going back—going
back— To the—Best—Old—Place—of—All. Going back—going back, From
all—this—earth-ly—ball, We’ll—clear—the—track—as—we—go—back—
Going—back—to—Nas-sau—Hall!”
Amory closed his eyes as the ghostly procession drew near. The
song soared so high that all dropped out except the tenors, who
bore the melody triumphantly past the danger-point and
relinquished it to the fantastic chorus. Then Amory opened his
eyes, half afraid that sight would spoil the rich illusion of
harmony.
He sighed eagerly. There at the head of the white platoon marched
Allenby, the football captain, slim and defiant, as if aware that
this year the hopes of the college rested on him, that his
hundred-and-sixty pounds were expected to dodge to victory
through the heavy blue and crimson lines.
Fascinated, Amory watched each rank of linked arms as it came
abreast, the faces indistinct above the polo shirts, the voices
blent in a paean of triumph—and then the procession passed
through shadowy Campbell Arch, and the voices grew fainter as it
wound eastward over the campus.
The minutes passed and Amory sat there very quietly. He regretted
the rule that would forbid freshmen to be outdoors after curfew,
for he wanted to ramble through the shadowy scented lanes, where
Witherspoon brooded like a dark mother over Whig and Clio, her
Attic children, where the black Gothic snake of Little curled
down to Cuyler and Patton, these in turn flinging the mystery out
over the placid slope rolling to the lake.
Princeton of the daytime filtered slowly into his
consciousness—West and Reunion, redolent of the sixties,
Seventy-nine Hall, brick-red and arrogant, Upper and Lower Pyne,
aristocratic Elizabethan ladies not quite content to live among
shopkeepers, and, topping all, climbing with clear blue
aspiration, the great dreaming spires of Holder and Cleveland
towers.
From the first he loved Princeton—its lazy beauty, its
half-grasped significance, the wild moonlight revel of the
rushes, the handsome, prosperous big-game crowds, and under it
all the air of struggle that pervaded his class. From the day
when, wild-eyed and exhausted, the jerseyed freshmen sat in the
gymnasium and elected some one from Hill School class president,
a Lawrenceville celebrity vice-president, a hockey star from St.
Paul’s secretary, up until the end of sophomore year it never
ceased, that breathless social system, that worship, seldom
named, never really admitted, of the bogey “Big Man.”
First it was schools, and Amory, alone from St. Regis’, watched
the crowds form and widen and form again; St. Paul’s, Hill,
Pomfret, eating at certain tacitly reserved tables in Commons,
dressing in their own corners of the gymnasium, and drawing
unconsciously about them a barrier of the slightly less important
but socially ambitious to protect them from the friendly, rather
puzzled high-school element. From the moment he realized this
Amory resented social barriers as artificial distinctions made by
the strong to bolster up their weak retainers and keep out the
almost strong.
Having decided to be one of the gods of the class, he reported
for freshman football practice, but in the second week, playing
quarter-back, already paragraphed in corners of the Princetonian,
he wrenched his knee seriously enough to put him out for the rest
of the season. This forced him to retire and consider the
situation.
“12 Univee” housed a dozen miscellaneous question-marks. There
were three or four inconspicuous and quite startled boys from
Lawrenceville, two amateur wild men from a New York private
school (Kerry Holiday christened them the “plebeian drunks”), a
Jewish youth, also from New York, and, as compensation for Amory,
the two Holidays, to whom he took an instant fancy.
The Holidays were rumored twins, but really the dark-haired one,
Kerry, was a year older than his blond brother, Burne. Kerry was
tall, with humorous gray eyes, and a sudden, attractive smile; he
became at once the mentor of the house, reaper of ears that grew
too high, censor of conceit, vendor of rare, satirical humor.
Amory spread the table of their future friendship with all his
ideas of what college should and did mean. Kerry, not inclined as
yet to take things seriously, chided him gently for being curious
at this inopportune time about the intricacies of the social
system, but liked him and was both interested and amused.
Burne, fair-haired, silent, and intent, appeared in the house
only as a busy apparition, gliding in quietly at night and off
again in the early morning to get up his work in the library—he
was out for the Princetonian, competing furiously against forty
others for the coveted first place. In December he came down with
diphtheria, and some one else won the competition, but, returning
to college in February, he dauntlessly went after the prize
again. Necessarily, Amory’s acquaintance with him was in the way
of three-minute chats, walking to and from lectures, so he failed
to penetrate Burne’s one absorbing interest and find what lay
beneath it.
Amory was far from contented. He missed the place he had won at
St. Regis’, the being known and admired, yet Princeton stimulated
him, and there were many things ahead calculated to arouse the
Machiavelli latent in him, could he but insert a wedge. The
upper-class clubs, concerning which he had pumped a reluctant
graduate during the previous summer, excited his curiosity: Ivy,
detached and breathlessly aristocratic; Cottage, an impressive
mélange of brilliant adventurers and well-dressed philanderers;
Tiger Inn, broad-shouldered and athletic, vitalized by an honest
elaboration of prep-school standards; Cap and Gown,
anti-alcoholic, faintly religious and politically powerful;
flamboyant Colonial; literary Quadrangle; and the dozen others,
varying in age and position.
Anything which brought an under classman into too glaring a light
was labelled with the damning brand of “running it out.” The
movies thrived on caustic comments, but the men who made them
were generally running it out; talking of clubs was running it
out; standing for anything very strongly, as, for instance,
drinking parties or teetotalling, was running it out; in short,
being personally conspicuous was not tolerated, and the
influential man was the non-committal man, until at club
elections in sophomore year every one should be sewed up in some
bag for the rest of his college career.
Amory found that writing for the Nassau Literary Magazine would