This Side of Paradise
partially taken in and wholly delighted. In a good-natured way he
had almost decided that Princeton was one part deadly Philistines
and one part deadly grinds, and to find a person who could
mention Keats without stammering, yet evidently washed his hands,
was rather a treat.
“Ever read any Oscar Wilde?” he asked.
“No. Who wrote it?”
“It’s a man—don’t you know?”
“Oh, surely.” A faint chord was struck in Amory’s memory. “Wasn’t
the comic opera, ‘Patience,’ written about him?”
“Yes, that’s the fella. I’ve just finished a book of his, ‘The
Picture of Dorian Gray,’ and I certainly wish you’d read it.
You’d like it. You can borrow it if you want to.”
“Why, I’d like it a lot—thanks.”
“Don’t you want to come up to the room? I’ve got a few other
books.”
Amory hesitated, glanced at the St. Paul’s group—one of them was
the magnificent, exquisite Humbird—and he considered how
determinate the addition of this friend would be. He never got to
the stage of making them and getting rid of them—he was not hard
enough for that—so he measured Thomas Parke D’Invilliers’
undoubted attractions and value against the menace of cold eyes
behind tortoise-rimmed spectacles that he fancied glared from the
next table.
“Yes, I’ll go.”
So he found “Dorian Gray” and the “Mystic and Somber Dolores” and
the “Belle Dame sans Merci”; for a month was keen on naught else.
The world became pale and interesting, and he tried hard to look
at Princeton through the satiated eyes of Oscar Wilde and
Swinburne—or “Fingal O’Flaherty” and “Algernon Charles,” as he
called them in precieuse jest. He read enormously every
night—Shaw, Chesterton, Barrie, Pinero, Yeats, Synge, Ernest
Dowson, Arthur Symons, Keats, Sudermann, Robert Hugh Benson, the
Savoy Operas—just a heterogeneous mixture, for he suddenly
discovered that he had read nothing for years.
Tom D’Invilliers became at first an occasion rather than a
friend. Amory saw him about once a week, and together they gilded
the ceiling of Tom’s room and decorated the walls with imitation
tapestry, bought at an auction, tall candlesticks and figured
curtains. Amory liked him for being clever and literary without
effeminacy or affectation. In fact, Amory did most of the
strutting and tried painfully to make every remark an epigram,
than which, if one is content with ostensible epigrams, there are
many feats harder. 12 Univee was amused. Kerry read “Dorian Gray”
and simulated Lord Henry, following Amory about, addressing him
as “Dorian” and pretending to encourage in him wicked fancies and
attenuated tendencies to ennui. When he carried it into Commons,
to the amazement of the others at table, Amory became furiously
embarrassed, and after that made epigrams only before
D’Invilliers or a convenient mirror.
One day Tom and Amory tried reciting their own and Lord Dunsany’s
poems to the music of Kerry’s graphophone.
“Chant!” cried Tom. “Don’t recite! Chant!”
Amory, who was performing, looked annoyed, and claimed that he
needed a record with less piano in it. Kerry thereupon rolled on
the floor in stifled laughter.
“Put on ‘Hearts and Flowers’!” he howled. “Oh, my Lord, I’m going
to cast a kitten.”
“Shut off the damn graphophone,” Amory cried, rather red in the
face. “I’m not giving an exhibition.”
In the meanwhile Amory delicately kept trying to awaken a sense
of the social system in D’Invilliers, for he knew that this poet
was really more conventional than he, and needed merely watered
hair, a smaller range of conversation, and a darker brown hat to
become quite regular. But the liturgy of Livingstone collars and
dark ties fell on heedless ears; in fact D’Invilliers faintly
resented his efforts; so Amory confined himself to calls once a
week, and brought him occasionally to 12 Univee. This caused mild
titters among the other freshmen, who called them “Doctor Johnson
and Boswell.”
Alec Connage, another frequent visitor, liked him in a vague way,
but was afraid of him as a highbrow. Kerry, who saw through his
poetic patter to the solid, almost respectable depths within, was
immensely amused and would have him recite poetry by the hour,
while he lay with closed eyes on Amory’s sofa and listened:
“Asleep or waking is it? for her neck Kissed over close, wears yet a
purple speck Wherein the pained blood falters and goes out; Soft and
stung softly—fairer for a fleck...”
“That’s good,” Kerry would say softly. “It pleases the elder
Holiday. That’s a great poet, I guess.” Tom, delighted at an
audience, would ramble through the “Poems and Ballades” until
Kerry and Amory knew them almost as well as he.
Amory took to writing poetry on spring afternoons, in the gardens
of the big estates near Princeton, while swans made effective
atmosphere in the artificial pools, and slow clouds sailed
harmoniously above the willows. May came too soon, and suddenly
unable to bear walls, he wandered the campus at all hours through
starlight and rain.
A DAMP SYMBOLIC INTERLUDE
The night mist fell. From the moon it rolled, clustered about the
spires and towers, and then settled below them, so that the
dreaming peaks were still in lofty aspiration toward the sky.
Figures that dotted the day like ants now brushed along as
shadowy ghosts, in and out of the foreground. The Gothic halls
and cloisters were infinitely more mysterious as they loomed
suddenly out of the darkness, outlined each by myriad faint
squares of yellow light. Indefinitely from somewhere a bell
boomed the quarter-hour, and Amory, pausing by the sun-dial,
stretched himself out full length on the damp grass. The cool
bathed his eyes and slowed the flight of time—time that had crept
so insidiously through the lazy April afternoons, seemed so
intangible in the long spring twilights. Evening after evening
the senior singing had drifted over the campus in melancholy
beauty, and through the shell of his undergraduate consciousness
had broken a deep and reverent devotion to the gray walls and
Gothic peaks and all they symbolized as warehouses of dead ages.
The tower that in view of his window sprang upward, grew into a
spire, yearning higher until its uppermost tip was half invisible
against the morning skies, gave him the first sense of the
transiency and unimportance of the campus figures except as
holders of the apostolic succession. He liked knowing that Gothic
architecture, with its upward trend, was peculiarly appropriate
to universities, and the idea became personal to him. The silent
stretches of green, the quiet halls with an occasional
late-burning scholastic light held his imagination in a strong
grasp, and the chastity of the spire became a symbol of this
perception.
“Damn it all,” he whispered aloud, wetting his hands in the damp
and running them through his hair. “Next year I work!” Yet he
knew that where now the spirit of spires and towers made him
dreamily acquiescent, it would then overawe him. Where now he
realized only his own inconsequence, effort would make him aware
of his own impotency and insufficiency.
The college dreamed on—awake. He felt a nervous excitement that
might have been the very throb of its slow heart. It was a stream
where he was to throw a stone whose faint ripple would be
vanishing almost as it left his hand. As yet he had given
nothing, he had taken nothing.
A belated freshman, his oilskin slicker rasping loudly, slushed
along the soft path. A voice from somewhere called the inevitable
formula, “Stick out your head!” below an unseen window. A hundred
little sounds of the current drifting on under the fog pressed in
finally on his consciousness.
“Oh, God!” he cried suddenly, and started at the sound of his
voice in the stillness. The rain dripped on. A minute longer he
lay without moving, his hands clinched. Then he sprang to his
feet and gave his clothes a tentative pat.
“I’m very damn wet!” he said aloud to the sun-dial.
HISTORICAL
The war began in the summer following his freshman year. Beyond a
sporting interest in the German dash for Paris the whole affair
failed either to thrill or interest him. With the attitude he
might have held toward an amusing melodrama he hoped it would be
long and bloody. If it had not continued he would have felt like
an irate ticket-holder at a prize-fight where the principals
refused to mix it up.
That was his total reaction.
“HA-HA HORTENSE!”
“All right, ponies!”
“Shake it up!”
“Hey, ponies—how about easing up on that crap game and shaking a
mean hip?”
“Hey, _ponies!_”
The coach fumed helplessly, the Triangle Club president,
glowering with anxiety, varied between furious bursts of
authority and fits of temperamental lassitude, when he sat
spiritless and wondered how the devil the show was ever going on
tour by Christmas.
“All right. We’ll take the pirate song.”
The ponies took last drags at their cigarettes and slumped into
place; the leading lady rushed into the foreground, setting his
hands and feet in an atmospheric mince; and as the coach clapped
and stamped and tumped and da-da’d, they hashed out a dance.
A great, seething ant-hill was the Triangle Club. It gave a
musical comedy every year, travelling with cast, chorus,
orchestra, and scenery all through Christmas vacation. The play
and music were the work of undergraduates, and the club itself
was the most influential of institutions, over three hundred men
competing for it every year.
Amory, after an easy victory in the first sophomore Princetonian
competition, stepped into a vacancy of the cast as Boiling Oil, a
Pirate Lieutenant. Every night for the last week they had
rehearsed “Ha-Ha Hortense!” in the Casino, from two in the
afternoon until eight in the morning, sustained by dark and
powerful coffee, and sleeping in lectures through the interim. A
rare scene, the Casino. A big, barnlike auditorium, dotted with
boys as girls, boys as pirates, boys as babies; the scenery in
course of being violently set up; the spotlight man rehearsing by
throwing weird shafts into angry eyes; over all the constant
tuning of the orchestra or the cheerful tumpty-tump of a Triangle
tune. The boy who writes the lyrics stands in the corner, biting
a pencil, with twenty minutes to think of an encore; the business
manager argues with the secretary as to how much money can be
spent on “those damn milkmaid costumes”; the old graduate,
president in ninety-eight, perches on a box and thinks how much
simpler it was in his day.
How a Triangle show ever got off was a mystery, but it was a
riotous mystery, anyway, whether or not one did enough service to
wear a little gold Triangle on his watch-chain. “Ha-Ha Hortense!”