Chapter 2: Spires and Gargoyles (1)

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?”

“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
get him nothing, but that being on the board of the Daily
Princetonian would get any one a good deal. His vague desire to
do immortal acting with the English Dramatic Association faded
out when he found that the most ingenious brains and talents were
concentrated upon the Triangle Club, a musical comedy
organization that every year took a great Christmas trip. In the
meanwhile, feeling strangely alone and restless in Commons, with
new desires and ambitions stirring in his mind, he let the first
term go by between an envy of the embryo successes and a puzzled
fretting with Kerry as to why they were not accepted immediately
among the elite of the class.

Many afternoons they lounged in the windows of 12 Univee and
watched the class pass to and from Commons, noting satellites
already attaching themselves to the more prominent, watching the
lonely grind with his hurried step and downcast eye, envying the
happy security of the big school groups.

“We’re the damned middle class, that’s what!” he complained to
Kerry one day as he lay stretched out on the sofa, consuming a
family of Fatimas with contemplative precision.

“Well, why not? We came to Princeton so we could feel that way
toward the small colleges—have it on ’em, more self-confidence,
dress better, cut a swathe—”

“Oh, it isn’t that I mind the glittering caste system,” admitted
Amory. “I like having a bunch of hot cats on top, but gosh,
Kerry, I’ve got to be one of them.”

“But just now, Amory, you’re only a sweaty bourgeois.”

Amory lay for a moment without speaking.

“I won’t be—long,” he said finally. “But I hate to get anywhere
by working for it. I’ll show the marks, don’t you know.”

“Honorable scars.” Kerry craned his neck suddenly at the street.
“There’s Langueduc, if you want to see what he looks like—and
Humbird just behind.”

Amory rose dynamically and sought the windows.

“Oh,” he said, scrutinizing these worthies, “Humbird looks like a
knock-out, but this Langueduc—he’s the rugged type, isn’t he? I
distrust that sort. All diamonds look big in the rough.”

“Well,” said Kerry, as the excitement subsided, “you’re a
literary genius. It’s up to you.”

“I wonder”—Amory paused—“if I could be. I honestly think so
sometimes. That sounds like the devil, and I wouldn’t say it to
anybody except you.”

“Well—go ahead. Let your hair grow and write poems like this guy
D’Invilliers in the Lit.”

Amory reached lazily at a pile of magazines on the table.

“Read his latest effort?”

“Never miss ’em. They’re rare.”

Amory glanced through the issue.

“Hello!” he said in surprise, “he’s a freshman, isn’t he?”

“Yeah.”

“Listen to this! My God!

“‘A serving lady speaks: Black velvet trails its folds over the day,
White tapers, prisoned in their silver frames, Wave their thin flames
like shadows in the wind, Pia, Pompia, come—come away—’

“Now, what the devil does that mean?”

“It’s a pantry scene.”

“‘Her toes are stiffened like a stork’s in flight; She’s laid upon
her bed, on the white sheets, Her hands pressed on her smooth bust
like a saint, Bella Cunizza, come into the light!’

“My gosh, Kerry, what in hell is it all about? I swear I don’t
get him at all, and I’m a literary bird myself.”

“It’s pretty tricky,” said Kerry, “only you’ve got to think of
hearses and stale milk when you read it. That isn’t as pash as
some of them.”

Amory tossed the magazine on the table.

“Well,” he sighed, “I sure am up in the air. I know I’m not a
regular fellow, yet I loathe anybody else that isn’t. I can’t
decide whether to cultivate my mind and be a great dramatist, or
to thumb my nose at the Golden Treasury and be a Princeton
slicker.”

“Why decide?” suggested Kerry. “Better drift, like me. I’m going
to sail into prominence on Burne’s coat-tails.”

“I can’t drift—I want to be interested. I want to pull strings,
even for somebody else, or be Princetonian chairman or Triangle
president. I want to be admired, Kerry.”

“You’re thinking too much about yourself.”

Amory sat up at this.

“No. I’m thinking about you, too. We’ve got to get out and mix
around the class right now, when it’s fun to be a snob. I’d like
to bring a sardine to the prom in June, for instance, but I
wouldn’t do it unless I could be damn debonaire about
it—introduce her to all the prize parlor-snakes, and the football
captain, and all that simple stuff.”

“Amory,” said Kerry impatiently, “you’re just going around in a
circle. If you want to be prominent, get out and try for
something; if you don’t, just take it easy.” He yawned. “Come on,
let’s let the smoke drift off. We’ll go down and watch football
practice.”

Amory gradually accepted this point of view, decided that next
fall would inaugurate his career, and relinquished himself to
watching Kerry extract joy from 12 Univee.

They filled the Jewish youth’s bed with lemon pie; they put out
the gas all over the house every night by blowing into the jet in
Amory’s room, to the bewilderment of Mrs. Twelve and the local
plumber; they set up the effects of the plebeian drunks—pictures,
books, and furniture—in the bathroom, to the confusion of the
pair, who hazily discovered the transposition on their return
from a Trenton spree; they were disappointed beyond measure when
the plebeian drunks decided to take it as a joke; they played
red-dog and twenty-one and jackpot from dinner to dawn, and on
the occasion of one man’s birthday persuaded him to buy
sufficient champagne for a hilarious celebration. The donor of
the party having remained sober, Kerry and Amory accidentally
dropped him down two flights of stairs and called, shame-faced
and penitent, at the infirmary all the following week.

“Say, who are all these women?” demanded Kerry one day,
protesting at the size of Amory’s mail. “I’ve been looking at the
postmarks lately—Farmington and Dobbs and Westover and Dana
Hall—what’s the idea?”

Amory grinned.

“All from the Twin Cities.” He named them off. “There’s Marylyn
De Witt—she’s pretty, got a car of her own and that’s damn
convenient; there’s Sally Weatherby—she’s getting too fat;
there’s Myra St. Claire, she’s an old flame, easy to kiss if you
like it—”

“What line do you throw ’em?” demanded Kerry. “I’ve tried
everything, and the mad wags aren’t even afraid of me.”

“You’re the ‘nice boy’ type,” suggested Amory.

“That’s just it. Mother always feels the girl is safe if she’s
with me. Honestly, it’s annoying. If I start to hold somebody’s
hand, they laugh at me, and let me, just as if it wasn’t part of
them. As soon as I get hold of a hand they sort of disconnect it
from the rest of them.”

“Sulk,” suggested Amory. “Tell ’em you’re wild and have ’em
reform you—go home furious—come back in half an hour—startle
’em.”

Kerry shook his head.

“No chance. I wrote a St. Timothy girl a really loving letter
last year. In one place I got rattled and said: ‘My God, how I
love you!’ She took a nail scissors, clipped out the ‘My God’ and
showed the rest of the letter all over school. Doesn’t work at
all. I’m just ‘good old Kerry’ and all that rot.”

Amory smiled and tried to picture himself as “good old Amory.” He
failed completely.

February dripped snow and rain, the cyclonic freshman mid-years
passed, and life in 12 Univee continued interesting if not
purposeful. Once a day Amory indulged in a club sandwich,
cornflakes, and Julienne potatoes at “Joe’s,” accompanied usually
by Kerry or Alec Connage. The latter was a quiet, rather aloof
slicker from Hotchkiss, who lived next door and shared the same
enforced singleness as Amory, due to the fact that his entire
class had gone to Yale. “Joe’s” was unaesthetic and faintly
unsanitary, but a limitless charge account could be opened there,
a convenience that Amory appreciated. His father had been
experimenting with mining stocks and, in consequence, his
allowance, while liberal, was not at all what he had expected.

“Joe’s” had the additional advantage of seclusion from curious
upper-class eyes, so at four each afternoon Amory, accompanied by
friend or book, went up to experiment with his digestion. One day
in March, finding that all the tables were occupied, he slipped
into a chair opposite a freshman who bent intently over a book at
the last table. They nodded briefly. For twenty minutes Amory sat
consuming bacon buns and reading “Mrs. Warren’s Profession” (he
had discovered Shaw quite by accident while browsing in the
library during mid-years); the other freshman, also intent on his
volume, meanwhile did away with a trio of chocolate malted milks.

By and by Amory’s eyes wandered curiously to his fellow-luncher’s
book. He spelled out the name and title upside down—“Marpessa,”
by Stephen Phillips. This meant nothing to him, his metrical
education having been confined to such Sunday classics as “Come
into the Garden, Maude,” and what morsels of Shakespeare and
Milton had been recently forced upon him.

Moved to address his vis-a-vis, he simulated interest in his book
for a moment, and then exclaimed aloud as if involuntarily:

“Ha! Great stuff!”

The other freshman looked up and Amory registered artificial
embarrassment.

“Are you referring to your bacon buns?” His cracked, kindly voice
went well with the large spectacles and the impression of a
voluminous keenness that he gave.

“No,” Amory answered. “I was referring to Bernard Shaw.” He
turned the book around in explanation.

“I’ve never read any Shaw. I’ve always meant to.” The boy paused
and then continued: “Did you ever read Stephen Phillips, or do
you like poetry?”

“Yes, indeed,” Amory affirmed eagerly. “I’ve never read much of
Phillips, though.” (He had never heard of any Phillips except the
late David Graham.)

“It’s pretty fair, I think. Of course he’s a Victorian.” They
sallied into a discussion of poetry, in the course of which they
introduced themselves, and Amory’s companion proved to be none
other than “that awful highbrow, Thomas Parke D’Invilliers,” who
signed the passionate love-poems in the Lit. He was, perhaps,
nineteen, with stooped shoulders, pale blue eyes, and, as Amory
could tell from his general appearance, without much conception
of social competition and such phenomena of absorbing interest.
Still, he liked books, and it seemed forever since Amory had met
any one who did; if only that St. Paul’s crowd at the next table
would not mistake _him_ for a bird, too, he would enjoy the
encounter tremendously. They didn’t seem to be noticing, so he
let himself go, discussed books by the dozens—books he had read,
read about, books he had never heard of, rattling off lists of
titles with the facility of a Brentano’s clerk. D’Invilliers was
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!”
was written over six times and had the names of nine
collaborators on the programme. All Triangle shows started by
being “something different—not just a regular musical comedy,”
but when the several authors, the president, the coach and the
faculty committee finished with it, there remained just the old
reliable Triangle show with the old reliable jokes and the star
comedian who got expelled or sick or something just before the
trip, and the dark-whiskered man in the pony-ballet, who
“absolutely won’t shave twice a day, doggone it!”

There was one brilliant place in “Ha-Ha Hortense!” It is a
Princeton tradition that whenever a Yale man who is a member of
the widely advertised “Skull and Bones” hears the sacred name
mentioned, he must leave the room. It is also a tradition that
the members are invariably successful in later life, amassing
fortunes or votes or coupons or whatever they choose to amass.
Therefore, at each performance of “Ha-Ha Hortense!” half-a-dozen
seats were kept from sale and occupied by six of the
worst-looking vagabonds that could be hired from the streets,
further touched up by the Triangle make-up man. At the moment in
the show where Firebrand, the Pirate Chief, pointed at his black
flag and said, “I am a Yale graduate—note my Skull and Bones!”—at
this very moment the six vagabonds were instructed to rise
_conspicuously_ and leave the theatre with looks of deep
melancholy and an injured dignity. It was claimed though never
proved that on one occasion the hired Elis were swelled by one of
the real thing.

They played through vacation to the fashionable of eight cities.
Amory liked Louisville and Memphis best: these knew how to meet
strangers, furnished extraordinary punch, and flaunted an
astonishing array of feminine beauty. Chicago he approved for a
certain verve that transcended its loud accent—however, it was a
Yale town, and as the Yale Glee Club was expected in a week the
Triangle received only divided homage. In Baltimore, Princeton
was at home, and every one fell in love. There was a proper
consumption of strong waters all along the line; one man
invariably went on the stage highly stimulated, claiming that his
particular interpretation of the part required it. There were
three private cars; however, no one slept except in the third
car, which was called the “animal car,” and where were herded the
spectacled wind-jammers of the orchestra. Everything was so
hurried that there was no time to be bored, but when they arrived
in Philadelphia, with vacation nearly over, there was rest in
getting out of the heavy atmosphere of flowers and grease-paint,
and the ponies took off their corsets with abdominal pains and
sighs of relief.

When the disbanding came, Amory set out post haste for
Minneapolis, for Sally Weatherby’s cousin, Isabelle Borge, was
coming to spend the winter in Minneapolis while her parents went
abroad. He remembered Isabelle only as a little girl with whom he
had played sometimes when he first went to Minneapolis. She had
gone to Baltimore to live—but since then she had developed a
past.

Amory was in full stride, confident, nervous, and jubilant.
Scurrying back to Minneapolis to see a girl he had known as a
child seemed the interesting and romantic thing to do, so without
compunction he wired his mother not to expect him... sat in the
train, and thought about himself for thirty-six hours.

“PETTING”

On the Triangle trip Amory had come into constant contact with
that great current American phenomenon, the “petting party.”

None of the Victorian mothers—and most of the mothers were
Victorian—had any idea how casually their daughters were
accustomed to be kissed. “Servant-girls are that way,” says Mrs.
Huston-Carmelite to her popular daughter. “They are kissed first
and proposed to afterward.”

But the Popular Daughter becomes engaged every six months between
sixteen and twenty-two, when she arranges a match with young
Hambell, of Cambell & Hambell, who fatuously considers himself
her first love, and between engagements the P. D. (she is
selected by the cut-in system at dances, which favors the
survival of the fittest) has other sentimental last kisses in the
moonlight, or the firelight, or the outer darkness.

Amory saw girls doing things that even in his memory would have
been impossible: eating three-o’clock, after-dance suppers in
impossible cafes, talking of every side of life with an air half
of earnestness, half of mockery, yet with a furtive excitement
that Amory considered stood for a real moral let-down. But he
never realized how wide-spread it was until he saw the cities
between New York and Chicago as one vast juvenile intrigue.

Afternoon at the Plaza, with winter twilight hovering outside and
faint drums down-stairs... they strut and fret in the lobby,
taking another cocktail, scrupulously attired and waiting. Then
the swinging doors revolve and three bundles of fur mince in. The
theatre comes afterward; then a table at the Midnight Frolic—of
course, mother will be along there, but she will serve only to
make things more secretive and brilliant as she sits in solitary
state at the deserted table and thinks such entertainments as
this are not half so bad as they are painted, only rather
wearying. But the P. D. is in love again... it was odd, wasn’t
it?—that though there was so much room left in the taxi the P. D.
and the boy from Williams were somehow crowded out and had to go
in a separate car. Odd! Didn’t you notice how flushed the P. D.
was when she arrived just seven minutes late? But the P. D. “gets
away with it.”

The “belle” had become the “flirt,” the “flirt” had become the
“baby vamp.” The “belle” had five or six callers every afternoon.
If the P. D., by some strange accident, has two, it is made
pretty uncomfortable for the one who hasn’t a date with her. The
“belle” was surrounded by a dozen men in the intermissions
between dances. Try to find the P. D. between dances, just _try_
to find her.

The same girl... deep in an atmosphere of jungle music and the
questioning of moral codes. Amory found it rather fascinating to
feel that any popular girl he met before eight he might quite
possibly kiss before twelve.

“Why on earth are we here?” he asked the girl with the green
combs one night as they sat in some one’s limousine, outside the
Country Club in Louisville.

“I don’t know. I’m just full of the devil.”

“Let’s be frank—we’ll never see each other again. I wanted to
come out here with you because I thought you were the
best-looking girl in sight. You really don’t care whether you
ever see me again, do you?”

“No—but is this your line for every girl? What have I done to
deserve it?”

“And you didn’t feel tired dancing or want a cigarette or any of
the things you said? You just wanted to be—”

“Oh, let’s go in,” she interrupted, “if you want to _analyze_.
Let’s not _talk_ about it.”

When the hand-knit, sleeveless jerseys were stylish, Amory, in a
burst of inspiration, named them “petting shirts.” The name
travelled from coast to coast on the lips of parlor-snakes and P.
D.’s.

DESCRIPTIVE

Amory was now eighteen years old, just under six feet tall and
exceptionally, but not conventionally, handsome. He had rather a
young face, the ingenuousness of which was marred by the
penetrating green eyes, fringed with long dark eyelashes. He
lacked somehow that intense animal magnetism that so often
accompanies beauty in men or women; his personality seemed rather
a mental thing, and it was not in his power to turn it on and off
like a water-faucet. But people never forgot his face.

ISABELLE

She paused at the top of the staircase. The sensations attributed
to divers on spring-boards, leading ladies on opening nights, and
lumpy, husky young men on the day of the Big Game, crowded
through her. She should have descended to a burst of drums or a
discordant blend of themes from “Thais” and “Carmen.” She had
never been so curious about her appearance, she had never been so
satisfied with it. She had been sixteen years old for six months.

“Isabelle!” called her cousin Sally from the doorway of the
dressing-room.

“I’m ready.” She caught a slight lump of nervousness in her
throat.

“I had to send back to the house for another pair of slippers.
It’ll be just a minute.”

Isabelle started toward the dressing-room for a last peek in the
mirror, but something decided her to stand there and gaze down
the broad stairs of the Minnehaha Club. They curved
tantalizingly, and she could catch just a glimpse of two pairs of
masculine feet in the hall below. Pump-shod in uniform black,
they gave no hint of identity, but she wondered eagerly if one
pair were attached to Amory Blaine. This young man, not as yet
encountered, had nevertheless taken up a considerable part of her
day—the first day of her arrival. Coming up in the machine from
the station, Sally had volunteered, amid a rain of question,
comment, revelation, and exaggeration:

“You remember Amory Blaine, of _course_. Well, he’s simply mad to
see you again. He’s stayed over a day from college, and he’s
coming to-night. He’s heard so much about you—says he remembers
your eyes.”

This had pleased Isabelle. It put them on equal terms, although
she was quite capable of staging her own romances, with or
without advance advertising. But following her happy tremble of
anticipation, came a sinking sensation that made her ask:

“How do you mean he’s heard about me? What sort of things?”

Sally smiled. She felt rather in the capacity of a showman with
her more exotic cousin.

“He knows you’re—you’re considered beautiful and all that”—she
paused—“and I guess he knows you’ve been kissed.”

At this Isabelle’s little fist had clinched suddenly under the
fur robe. She was accustomed to be thus followed by her desperate
past, and it never failed to rouse in her the same feeling of
resentment; yet—in a strange town it was an advantageous
reputation. She was a “Speed,” was she? Well—let them find out.

Out of the window Isabelle watched the snow glide by in the
frosty morning. It was ever so much colder here than in
Baltimore; she had not remembered; the glass of the side door was
iced, the windows were shirred with snow in the corners. Her mind
played still with one subject. Did _he_ dress like that boy
there, who walked calmly down a bustling business street, in
moccasins and winter-carnival costume? How very _Western!_ Of
course he wasn’t that way: he went to Princeton, was a sophomore
or something. Really she had no distinct idea of him. An ancient
snap-shot she had preserved in an old kodak book had impressed
her by the big eyes (which he had probably grown up to by now).
However, in the last month, when her winter visit to Sally had
been decided on, he had assumed the proportions of a worthy
adversary. Children, most astute of match-makers, plot their
campaigns quickly, and Sally had played a clever correspondence
sonata to Isabelle’s excitable temperament. Isabelle had been for
some time capable of very strong, if very transient emotions....

They drew up at a spreading, white-stone building, set back from
the snowy street. Mrs. Weatherby greeted her warmly and her
various younger cousins were produced from the corners where they
skulked politely. Isabelle met them tactfully. At her best she
allied all with whom she came in contact—except older girls and
some women. All the impressions she made were conscious. The
half-dozen girls she renewed acquaintance with that morning were
all rather impressed and as much by her direct personality as by
her reputation. Amory Blaine was an open subject. Evidently a bit
light of love, neither popular nor unpopular—every girl there
seemed to have had an affair with him at some time or other, but
no one volunteered any really useful information. He was going to
fall for her.... Sally had published that information to her
young set and they were retailing it back to Sally as fast as
they set eyes on Isabelle. Isabelle resolved secretly that she
would, if necessary, _force_ herself to like him—she owed it to
Sally. Suppose she were terribly disappointed. Sally had painted
him in such glowing colors—he was good-looking, “sort of
distinguished, when he wants to be,” had a line, and was properly
inconstant. In fact, he summed up all the romance that her age
and environment led her to desire. She wondered if those were his
dancing-shoes that fox-trotted tentatively around the soft rug
below.

All impressions and, in fact, all ideas were extremely
kaleidoscopic to Isabelle. She had that curious mixture of the
social and the artistic temperaments found often in two classes,
society women and actresses. Her education or, rather, her
sophistication, had been absorbed from the boys who had dangled
on her favor; her tact was instinctive, and her capacity for
love-affairs was limited only by the number of the susceptible
within telephone distance. Flirt smiled from her large
black-brown eyes and shone through her intense physical
magnetism.

So she waited at the head of the stairs that evening while
slippers were fetched. Just as she was growing impatient, Sally
came out of the dressing-room, beaming with her accustomed good
nature and high spirits, and together they descended to the floor
below, while the shifting search-light of Isabelle’s mind flashed
on two ideas: she was glad she had high color to-night, and she
wondered if he danced well.

Down-stairs, in the club’s great room, she was surrounded for a
moment by the girls she had met in the afternoon, then she heard
Sally’s voice repeating a cycle of names, and found herself
bowing to a sextet of black and white, terribly stiff, vaguely
familiar figures. The name Blaine figured somewhere, but at first
she could not place him. A very confused, very juvenile moment of
awkward backings and bumpings followed, and every one found
himself talking to the person he least desired to. Isabelle
manoeuvred herself and Froggy Parker, freshman at Harvard, with
whom she had once played hop-scotch, to a seat on the stairs. A
humorous reference to the past was all she needed. The things
Isabelle could do socially with one idea were remarkable. First,
she repeated it rapturously in an enthusiastic contralto with a
soupcon of Southern accent; then she held it off at a distance
and smiled at it—her wonderful smile; then she delivered it in
variations and played a sort of mental catch with it, all this in
the nominal form of dialogue. Froggy was fascinated and quite
unconscious that this was being done, not for him, but for the
green eyes that glistened under the shining carefully watered
hair, a little to her left, for Isabelle had discovered Amory. As
an actress even in the fullest flush of her own conscious
magnetism gets a deep impression of most of the people in the
front row, so Isabelle sized up her antagonist. First, he had
auburn hair, and from her feeling of disappointment she knew that
she had expected him to be dark and of garter-advertisement
slenderness.... For the rest, a faint flush and a straight,
romantic profile; the effect set off by a close-fitting dress
suit and a silk ruffled shirt of the kind that women still
delight to see men wear, but men were just beginning to get tired
of.

During this inspection Amory was quietly watching.

“Don’t _you_ think so?” she said suddenly, turning to him,
innocent-eyed.

There was a stir, and Sally led the way over to their table.
Amory struggled to Isabelle’s side, and whispered:

“You’re my dinner partner, you know. We’re all coached for each
other.”

Isabelle gasped—this was rather right in line. But really she
felt as if a good speech had been taken from the star and given
to a minor character.... She mustn’t lose the leadership a bit.
The dinner-table glittered with laughter at the confusion of
getting places and then curious eyes were turned on her, sitting
near the head. She was enjoying this immensely, and Froggy Parker
was so engrossed with the added sparkle of her rising color that
he forgot to pull out Sally’s chair, and fell into a dim
confusion. Amory was on the other side, full of confidence and
vanity, gazing at her in open admiration. He began directly, and
so did Froggy:

“I’ve heard a lot about you since you wore braids—”

“Wasn’t it funny this afternoon—”

Both stopped. Isabelle turned to Amory shyly. Her face was always
enough answer for any one, but she decided to speak.

“How—from whom?”

“From everybody—for all the years since you’ve been away.” She
blushed appropriately. On her right Froggy was _hors de combat_
already, although he hadn’t quite realized it.

“I’ll tell you what I remembered about you all these years,”
Amory continued. She leaned slightly toward him and looked
modestly at the celery before her. Froggy sighed—he knew Amory,
and the situations that Amory seemed born to handle. He turned to
Sally and asked her if she was going away to school next year.
Amory opened with grape-shot.

“I’ve got an adjective that just fits you.” This was one of his
favorite starts—he seldom had a word in mind, but it was a
curiosity provoker, and he could always produce something
complimentary if he got in a tight corner.

“Oh—what?” Isabelle’s face was a study in enraptured curiosity.

Amory shook his head.

“I don’t know you very well yet.”

“Will you tell me—afterward?” she half whispered.

He nodded.

“We’ll sit out.”

Isabelle nodded.

“Did any one ever tell you, you have keen eyes?” she said.

Amory attempted to make them look even keener. He fancied, but he
was not sure, that her foot had just touched his under the table.
But it might possibly have been only the table leg. It was so
hard to tell. Still it thrilled him. He wondered quickly if there
would be any difficulty in securing the little den up-stairs.

BABES IN THE WOODS