Chapter 2: Spires and Gargoyles (2)

Isabelle and Amory were distinctly not innocent, nor were they
particularly brazen. Moreover, amateur standing had very little
value in the game they were playing, a game that would presumably
be her principal study for years to come. She had begun as he
had, with good looks and an excitable temperament, and the rest
was the result of accessible popular novels and dressing-room
conversation culled from a slightly older set. Isabelle had
walked with an artificial gait at nine and a half, and when her
eyes, wide and starry, proclaimed the ingenue most. Amory was
proportionately less deceived. He waited for the mask to drop
off, but at the same time he did not question her right to wear
it. She, on her part, was not impressed by his studied air of
blasé sophistication. She had lived in a larger city and had
slightly an advantage in range. But she accepted his pose—it was
one of the dozen little conventions of this kind of affair. He
was aware that he was getting this particular favor now because
she had been coached; he knew that he stood for merely the best
game in sight, and that he would have to improve his opportunity
before he lost his advantage. So they proceeded with an infinite
guile that would have horrified her parents.

After the dinner the dance began... smoothly. Smoothly?—boys cut
in on Isabelle every few feet and then squabbled in the corners
with: “You might let me get more than an inch!” and “She didn’t
like it either—she told me so next time I cut in.” It was
true—she told every one so, and gave every hand a parting
pressure that said: “You know that your dances are _making_ my
evening.”

But time passed, two hours of it, and the less subtle beaux had
better learned to focus their pseudo-passionate glances
elsewhere, for eleven o’clock found Isabelle and Amory sitting on
the couch in the little den off the reading-room up-stairs. She
was conscious that they were a handsome pair, and seemed to
belong distinctively in this seclusion, while lesser lights
fluttered and chattered down-stairs.

Boys who passed the door looked in enviously—girls who passed
only laughed and frowned and grew wise within themselves.

They had now reached a very definite stage. They had traded
accounts of their progress since they had met last, and she had
listened to much she had heard before. He was a sophomore, was on
the Princetonian board, hoped to be chairman in senior year. He
learned that some of the boys she went with in Baltimore were
“terrible speeds” and came to dances in states of artificial
stimulation; most of them were twenty or so, and drove alluring
red Stutzes. A good half seemed to have already flunked out of
various schools and colleges, but some of them bore athletic
names that made him look at her admiringly. As a matter of fact,
Isabelle’s closer acquaintance with the universities was just
commencing. She had bowing acquaintance with a lot of young men
who thought she was a “pretty kid—worth keeping an eye on.” But
Isabelle strung the names into a fabrication of gayety that would
have dazzled a Viennese nobleman. Such is the power of young
contralto voices on sink-down sofas.

He asked her if she thought he was conceited. She said there was
a difference between conceit and self-confidence. She adored
self-confidence in men.

“Is Froggy a good friend of yours?” she asked.

“Rather—why?”

“He’s a bum dancer.”

Amory laughed.

“He dances as if the girl were on his back instead of in his
arms.”

She appreciated this.

“You’re awfully good at sizing people up.”

Amory denied this painfully. However, he sized up several people
for her. Then they talked about hands.

“You’ve got awfully nice hands,” she said. “They look as if you
played the piano. Do you?”

I have said they had reached a very definite stage—nay, more, a
very critical stage. Amory had stayed over a day to see her, and
his train left at twelve-eighteen that night. His trunk and
suitcase awaited him at the station; his watch was beginning to
hang heavy in his pocket.

“Isabelle,” he said suddenly, “I want to tell you something.”
They had been talking lightly about “that funny look in her
eyes,” and Isabelle knew from the change in his manner what was
coming—indeed, she had been wondering how soon it would come.
Amory reached above their heads and turned out the electric
light, so that they were in the dark, except for the red glow
that fell through the door from the reading-room lamps. Then he
began:

“I don’t know whether or not you know what you—what I’m going to
say. Lordy, Isabelle—this _sounds_ like a line, but it isn’t.”

“I know,” said Isabelle softly.

“Maybe we’ll never meet again like this—I have darned hard luck
sometimes.” He was leaning away from her on the other arm of the
lounge, but she could see his eyes plainly in the dark.

“You’ll meet me again—silly.” There was just the slightest
emphasis on the last word—so that it became almost a term of
endearment. He continued a bit huskily:

“I’ve fallen for a lot of people—girls—and I guess you have,
too—boys, I mean, but, honestly, you—” he broke off suddenly and
leaned forward, chin on his hands: “Oh, what’s the use—you’ll go
your way and I suppose I’ll go mine.”

Silence for a moment. Isabelle was quite stirred; she wound her
handkerchief into a tight ball, and by the faint light that
streamed over her, dropped it deliberately on the floor. Their
hands touched for an instant, but neither spoke. Silences were
becoming more frequent and more delicious. Outside another stray
couple had come up and were experimenting on the piano in the
next room. After the usual preliminary of “chopsticks,” one of
them started “Babes in the Woods” and a light tenor carried the
words into the den:

“Give me your hand I’ll understand We’re off to slumberland.”

Isabelle hummed it softly and trembled as she felt Amory’s hand
close over hers.

“Isabelle,” he whispered. “You know I’m mad about you. You _do_
give a darn about me.”

“Yes.”

“How much do you care—do you like any one better?”

“No.” He could scarcely hear her, although he bent so near that
he felt her breath against his cheek.

“Isabelle, I’m going back to college for six long months, and why
shouldn’t we—if I could only just have one thing to remember you
by—”

“Close the door....” Her voice had just stirred so that he half
wondered whether she had spoken at all. As he swung the door
softly shut, the music seemed quivering just outside.

“Moonlight is bright, Kiss me good night.”

What a wonderful song, she thought—everything was wonderful
to-night, most of all this romantic scene in the den, with their
hands clinging and the inevitable looming charmingly close. The
future vista of her life seemed an unending succession of scenes
like this: under moonlight and pale starlight, and in the backs
of warm limousines and in low, cosy roadsters stopped under
sheltering trees—only the boy might change, and this one was so
nice. He took her hand softly. With a sudden movement he turned
it and, holding it to his lips, kissed the palm.

“Isabelle!” His whisper blended in the music, and they seemed to
float nearer together. Her breath came faster. “Can’t I kiss you,
Isabelle—Isabelle?” Lips half parted, she turned her head to him
in the dark. Suddenly the ring of voices, the sound of running
footsteps surged toward them. Quick as a flash Amory reached up
and turned on the light, and when the door opened and three boys,
the wrathy and dance-craving Froggy among them, rushed in, he was
turning over the magazines on the table, while she sat without
moving, serene and unembarrassed, and even greeted them with a
welcoming smile. But her heart was beating wildly, and she felt
somehow as if she had been deprived.

It was evidently over. There was a clamor for a dance, there was
a glance that passed between them—on his side despair, on hers
regret, and then the evening went on, with the reassured beaux
and the eternal cutting in.

At quarter to twelve Amory shook hands with her gravely, in the
midst of a small crowd assembled to wish him good-speed. For an
instant he lost his poise, and she felt a bit rattled when a
satirical voice from a concealed wit cried:

“Take her outside, Amory!” As he took her hand he pressed it a
little, and she returned the pressure as she had done to twenty
hands that evening—that was all.

At two o’clock back at the Weatherbys’ Sally asked her if she and
Amory had had a “time” in the den. Isabelle turned to her
quietly. In her eyes was the light of the idealist, the inviolate
dreamer of Joan-like dreams.

“No,” she answered. “I don’t do that sort of thing any more; he
asked me to, but I said no.”

As she crept in bed she wondered what he’d say in his special
delivery to-morrow. He had such a good-looking mouth—would she
ever—?

“Fourteen angels were watching o’er them,” sang Sally sleepily
from the next room.

“Damn!” muttered Isabelle, punching the pillow into a luxurious
lump and exploring the cold sheets cautiously. “Damn!”

CARNIVAL

Amory, by way of the Princetonian, had arrived. The minor snobs,
finely balanced thermometers of success, warmed to him as the
club elections grew nigh, and he and Tom were visited by groups
of upper classmen who arrived awkwardly, balanced on the edge of
the furniture and talked of all subjects except the one of
absorbing interest. Amory was amused at the intent eyes upon him,
and, in case the visitors represented some club in which he was
not interested, took great pleasure in shocking them with
unorthodox remarks.

“Oh, let me see—” he said one night to a flabbergasted
delegation, “what club do you represent?”

With visitors from Ivy and Cottage and Tiger Inn he played the
“nice, unspoilt, ingenuous boy” very much at ease and quite
unaware of the object of the call.

When the fatal morning arrived, early in March, and the campus
became a document in hysteria, he slid smoothly into Cottage with
Alec Connage and watched his suddenly neurotic class with much
wonder.

There were fickle groups that jumped from club to club; there
were friends of two or three days who announced tearfully and
wildly that they must join the same club, nothing should separate
them; there were snarling disclosures of long-hidden grudges as
the Suddenly Prominent remembered snubs of freshman year. Unknown
men were elevated into importance when they received certain
coveted bids; others who were considered “all set” found that
they had made unexpected enemies, felt themselves stranded and
deserted, talked wildly of leaving college.

In his own crowd Amory saw men kept out for wearing green hats,
for being “a damn tailor’s dummy,” for having “too much pull in
heaven,” for getting drunk one night “not like a gentleman, by
God,” or for unfathomable secret reasons known to no one but the
wielders of the black balls.

This orgy of sociability culminated in a gigantic party at the
Nassau Inn, where punch was dispensed from immense bowls, and the
whole down-stairs became a delirious, circulating, shouting
pattern of faces and voices.

“Hi, Dibby—’gratulations!”

“Goo’ boy, Tom, you got a good bunch in Cap.”

“Say, Kerry—”

“Oh, Kerry—I hear you went Tiger with all the weight-lifters!”
“Well, I didn’t go Cottage—the parlor-snakes’ delight.”

“They say Overton fainted when he got his Ivy bid—Did he sign up
the first day?—oh, _no_. Tore over to Murray-Dodge on a
bicycle—afraid it was a mistake.”

“How’d you get into Cap—you old roue?”

“’Gratulations!”

“’Gratulations yourself. Hear you got a good crowd.”

When the bar closed, the party broke up into groups and streamed,
singing, over the snow-clad campus, in a weird delusion that
snobbishness and strain were over at last, and that they could do
what they pleased for the next two years.

Long afterward Amory thought of sophomore spring as the happiest
time of his life. His ideas were in tune with life as he found
it; he wanted no more than to drift and dream and enjoy a dozen
new-found friendships through the April afternoons.

Alec Connage came into his room one morning and woke him up into
the sunshine and peculiar glory of Campbell Hall shining in the
window.

“Wake up, Original Sin, and scrape yourself together. Be in front
of Renwick’s in half an hour. Somebody’s got a car.” He took the
bureau cover and carefully deposited it, with its load of small
articles, upon the bed.

“Where’d you get the car?” demanded Amory cynically.

“Sacred trust, but don’t be a critical goopher or you can’t go!”

“I think I’ll sleep,” Amory said calmly, resettling himself and
reaching beside the bed for a cigarette.

“Sleep!”

“Why not? I’ve got a class at eleven-thirty.”

“You damned gloom! Of course, if you don’t want to go to the
coast—”

With a bound Amory was out of bed, scattering the bureau cover’s
burden on the floor. The coast... he hadn’t seen it for years,
since he and his mother were on their pilgrimage.

“Who’s going?” he demanded as he wriggled into his B. V. D.’s.

“Oh, Dick Humbird and Kerry Holiday and Jesse Ferrenby and—oh
about five or six. Speed it up, kid!”

In ten minutes Amory was devouring cornflakes in Renwick’s, and
at nine-thirty they bowled happily out of town, headed for the
sands of Deal Beach.

“You see,” said Kerry, “the car belongs down there. In fact, it
was stolen from Asbury Park by persons unknown, who deserted it
in Princeton and left for the West. Heartless Humbird here got
permission from the city council to deliver it.”

“Anybody got any money?” suggested Ferrenby, turning around from
the front seat.

There was an emphatic negative chorus.

“That makes it interesting.”

“Money—what’s money? We can sell the car.”

“Charge him salvage or something.”

“How’re we going to get food?” asked Amory.

“Honestly,” answered Kerry, eying him reprovingly, “do you doubt
Kerry’s ability for three short days? Some people have lived on
nothing for years at a time. Read the Boy Scout Monthly.”

“Three days,” Amory mused, “and I’ve got classes.”

“One of the days is the Sabbath.”

“Just the same, I can only cut six more classes, with over a
month and a half to go.”

“Throw him out!”

“It’s a long walk back.”

“Amory, you’re running it out, if I may coin a new phrase.”

“Hadn’t you better get some dope on yourself, Amory?”

Amory subsided resignedly and drooped into a contemplation of the
scenery. Swinburne seemed to fit in somehow.

“Oh, winter’s rains and ruins are over, And all the seasons of snows
and sins; The days dividing lover and lover, The light that loses,
the night that wins; And time remembered is grief forgotten, And
frosts are slain and flowers begotten, And in green underwood and
cover, Blossom by blossom the spring begins.
“The full streams feed on flower of—”

“What’s the matter, Amory? Amory’s thinking about poetry, about
the pretty birds and flowers. I can see it in his eye.”

“No, I’m not,” he lied. “I’m thinking about the Princetonian. I
ought to make up to-night; but I can telephone back, I suppose.”

“Oh,” said Kerry respectfully, “these important men—”

Amory flushed and it seemed to him that Ferrenby, a defeated
competitor, winced a little. Of course, Kerry was only kidding,
but he really mustn’t mention the Princetonian.

It was a halcyon day, and as they neared the shore and the salt
breezes scurried by, he began to picture the ocean and long,
level stretches of sand and red roofs over blue sea. Then they
hurried through the little town and it all flashed upon his
consciousness to a mighty paean of emotion....

“Oh, good Lord! _Look_ at it!” he cried.

“What?”

“Let me out, quick—I haven’t seen it for eight years! Oh,
gentlefolk, stop the car!”

“What an odd child!” remarked Alec.

“I do believe he’s a bit eccentric.”

The car was obligingly drawn up at a curb, and Amory ran for the
boardwalk. First, he realized that the sea was blue and that
there was an enormous quantity of it, and that it roared and
roared—really all the banalities about the ocean that one could
realize, but if any one had told him then that these things were
banalities, he would have gaped in wonder.

“Now we’ll get lunch,” ordered Kerry, wandering up with the
crowd. “Come on, Amory, tear yourself away and get practical.”

“We’ll try the best hotel first,” he went on, “and thence and so
forth.”

They strolled along the boardwalk to the most imposing hostelry
in sight, and, entering the dining-room, scattered about a table.

“Eight Bronxes,” commanded Alec, “and a club sandwich and
Juliennes. The food for one. Hand the rest around.”

Amory ate little, having seized a chair where he could watch the
sea and feel the rock of it. When luncheon was over they sat and
smoked quietly.

“What’s the bill?”

Some one scanned it.

“Eight twenty-five.”

“Rotten overcharge. We’ll give them two dollars and one for the
waiter. Kerry, collect the small change.”

The waiter approached, and Kerry gravely handed him a dollar,
tossed two dollars on the check, and turned away. They sauntered
leisurely toward the door, pursued in a moment by the suspicious
Ganymede.

“Some mistake, sir.”

Kerry took the bill and examined it critically.

“No mistake!” he said, shaking his head gravely, and, tearing it
into four pieces, he handed the scraps to the waiter, who was so
dumfounded that he stood motionless and expressionless while they
walked out.

“Won’t he send after us?”

“No,” said Kerry; “for a minute he’ll think we’re the
proprietor’s sons or something; then he’ll look at the check
again and call the manager, and in the meantime—”

They left the car at Asbury and street-car’d to Allenhurst, where
they investigated the crowded pavilions for beauty. At four there
were refreshments in a lunch-room, and this time they paid an
even smaller per cent on the total cost; something about the
appearance and savoir-faire of the crowd made the thing go, and
they were not pursued.

“You see, Amory, we’re Marxian Socialists,” explained Kerry. “We
don’t believe in property and we’re putting it to the great
test.”

“Night will descend,” Amory suggested.

“Watch, and put your trust in Holiday.”

They became jovial about five-thirty and, linking arms, strolled
up and down the boardwalk in a row, chanting a monotonous ditty
about the sad sea waves. Then Kerry saw a face in the crowd that
attracted him and, rushing off, reappeared in a moment with one
of the homeliest girls Amory had ever set eyes on. Her pale mouth
extended from ear to ear, her teeth projected in a solid wedge,
and she had little, squinty eyes that peeped ingratiatingly over
the side sweep of her nose. Kerry presented them formally.

“Name of Kaluka, Hawaiian queen! Let me present Messrs. Connage,
Sloane, Humbird, Ferrenby, and Blaine.”

The girl bobbed courtesies all around. Poor creature; Amory
supposed she had never before been noticed in her life—possibly
she was half-witted. While she accompanied them (Kerry had
invited her to supper) she said nothing which could
discountenance such a belief.

“She prefers her native dishes,” said Alec gravely to the waiter,
“but any coarse food will do.”

All through supper he addressed her in the most respectful
language, while Kerry made idiotic love to her on the other side,
and she giggled and grinned. Amory was content to sit and watch
the by-play, thinking what a light touch Kerry had, and how he
could transform the barest incident into a thing of curve and
contour. They all seemed to have the spirit of it more or less,
and it was a relaxation to be with them. Amory usually liked men
individually, yet feared them in crowds unless the crowd was
around him. He wondered how much each one contributed to the
party, for there was somewhat of a spiritual tax levied. Alec and
Kerry were the life of it, but not quite the centre. Somehow the
quiet Humbird, and Sloane, with his impatient superciliousness,
were the centre.

Dick Humbird had, ever since freshman year, seemed to Amory a
perfect type of aristocrat. He was slender but well-built—black
curly hair, straight features, and rather a dark skin. Everything
he said sounded intangibly appropriate. He possessed infinite
courage, an averagely good mind, and a sense of honor with a
clear charm and _noblesse oblige_ that varied it from
righteousness. He could dissipate without going to pieces, and
even his most bohemian adventures never seemed “running it out.”
People dressed like him, tried to talk as he did.... Amory
decided that he probably held the world back, but he wouldn’t
have changed him. ...

He differed from the healthy type that was essentially middle
class—he never seemed to perspire. Some people couldn’t be
familiar with a chauffeur without having it returned; Humbird
could have lunched at Sherry’s with a colored man, yet people
would have somehow known that it was all right. He was not a
snob, though he knew only half his class. His friends ranged from
the highest to the lowest, but it was impossible to “cultivate”
him. Servants worshipped him, and treated him like a god. He
seemed the eternal example of what the upper class tries to be.

“He’s like those pictures in the Illustrated London News of the
English officers who have been killed,” Amory had said to Alec.
“Well,” Alec had answered, “if you want to know the shocking
truth, his father was a grocery clerk who made a fortune in
Tacoma real estate and came to New York ten years ago.”

Amory had felt a curious sinking sensation.

This present type of party was made possible by the surging
together of the class after club elections—as if to make a last
desperate attempt to know itself, to keep together, to fight off
the tightening spirit of the clubs. It was a let-down from the
conventional heights they had all walked so rigidly.

After supper they saw Kaluka to the boardwalk, and then strolled
back along the beach to Asbury. The evening sea was a new
sensation, for all its color and mellow age was gone, and it
seemed the bleak waste that made the Norse sagas sad; Amory
thought of Kipling’s

“Beaches of Lukanon before the sealers came.”

It was still a music, though, infinitely sorrowful.

Ten o’clock found them penniless. They had suppered greatly on
their last eleven cents and, singing, strolled up through the
casinos and lighted arches on the boardwalk, stopping to listen
approvingly to all band concerts. In one place Kerry took up a
collection for the French War Orphans which netted a dollar and
twenty cents, and with this they bought some brandy in case they
caught cold in the night. They finished the day in a
moving-picture show and went into solemn systematic roars of
laughter at an ancient comedy, to the startled annoyance of the
rest of the audience. Their entrance was distinctly strategic,
for each man as he entered pointed reproachfully at the one just
behind him. Sloane, bringing up the rear, disclaimed all
knowledge and responsibility as soon as the others were scattered
inside; then as the irate ticket-taker rushed in he followed
nonchalantly.

They reassembled later by the Casino and made arrangements for
the night. Kerry wormed permission from the watchman to sleep on
the platform and, having collected a huge pile of rugs from the
booths to serve as mattresses and blankets, they talked until
midnight, and then fell into a dreamless sleep, though Amory
tried hard to stay awake and watch that marvellous moon settle on
the sea.

So they progressed for two happy days, up and down the shore by
street-car or machine, or by shoe-leather on the crowded
boardwalk; sometimes eating with the wealthy, more frequently
dining frugally at the expense of an unsuspecting restaurateur.
They had their photos taken, eight poses, in a quick-development
store. Kerry insisted on grouping them as a “varsity” football
team, and then as a tough gang from the East Side, with their
coats inside out, and himself sitting in the middle on a
cardboard moon. The photographer probably has them yet—at least,
they never called for them. The weather was perfect, and again
they slept outside, and again Amory fell unwillingly asleep.

Sunday broke stolid and respectable, and even the sea seemed to
mumble and complain, so they returned to Princeton via the Fords
of transient farmers, and broke up with colds in their heads, but
otherwise none the worse for wandering.

Even more than in the year before, Amory neglected his work, not
deliberately but lazily and through a multitude of other
interests. Co-ordinate geometry and the melancholy hexameters of
Corneille and Racine held forth small allurements, and even
psychology, which he had eagerly awaited, proved to be a dull
subject full of muscular reactions and biological phrases rather
than the study of personality and influence. That was a noon
class, and it always sent him dozing. Having found that
“subjective and objective, sir,” answered most of the questions,
he used the phrase on all occasions, and it became the class joke
when, on a query being levelled at him, he was nudged awake by
Ferrenby or Sloane to gasp it out.

Mostly there were parties—to Orange or the Shore, more rarely to
New York and Philadelphia, though one night they marshalled
fourteen waitresses out of Childs’ and took them to ride down
Fifth Avenue on top of an auto bus. They all cut more classes
than were allowed, which meant an additional course the following
year, but spring was too rare to let anything interfere with
their colorful ramblings. In May Amory was elected to the
Sophomore Prom Committee, and when after a long evening’s
discussion with Alec they made out a tentative list of class
probabilities for the senior council, they placed themselves
among the surest. The senior council was composed presumably of
the eighteen most representative seniors, and in view of Alec’s
football managership and Amory’s chance of nosing out Burne
Holiday as Princetonian chairman, they seemed fairly justified in
this presumption. Oddly enough, they both placed D’Invilliers as
among the possibilities, a guess that a year before the class
would have gaped at.

All through the spring Amory had kept up an intermittent
correspondence with Isabelle Borge, punctuated by violent
squabbles and chiefly enlivened by his attempts to find new words
for love. He discovered Isabelle to be discreetly and
aggravatingly unsentimental in letters, but he hoped against hope
that she would prove not too exotic a bloom to fit the large
spaces of spring as she had fitted the den in the Minnehaha Club.
During May he wrote thirty-page documents almost nightly, and
sent them to her in bulky envelopes exteriorly labelled “Part I”
and “Part II.”

“Oh, Alec, I believe I’m tired of college,” he said sadly, as
they walked the dusk together.

“I think I am, too, in a way.”

“All I’d like would be a little home in the country, some warm
country, and a wife, and just enough to do to keep from rotting.”

“Me, too.”

“I’d like to quit.”

“What does your girl say?”

“Oh!” Amory gasped in horror. “She wouldn’t _think_ of
marrying... that is, not now. I mean the future, you know.”

“My girl would. I’m engaged.”

“Are you really?”

“Yes. Don’t say a word to anybody, please, but I am. I may not
come back next year.”

“But you’re only twenty! Give up college?”

“Why, Amory, you were saying a minute ago—”

“Yes,” Amory interrupted, “but I was just wishing. I wouldn’t
think of leaving college. It’s just that I feel so sad these
wonderful nights. I sort of feel they’re never coming again, and
I’m not really getting all I could out of them. I wish my girl
lived here. But marry—not a chance. Especially as father says the
money isn’t forthcoming as it used to be.”

“What a waste these nights are!” agreed Alec.

But Amory sighed and made use of the nights. He had a snap-shot
of Isabelle, enshrined in an old watch, and at eight almost every
night he would turn off all the lights except the desk lamp and,
sitting by the open windows with the picture before him, write
her rapturous letters.

... Oh it’s so hard to write you what I really _feel_ when I think
about you so much; you’ve gotten to mean to me a _dream_ that I can’t
put on paper any more. Your last letter came and it was wonderful! I
read it over about six times, especially the last part, but I do wish,
sometimes, you’d be more _frank_ and tell me what you really do think
of me, yet your last letter was too good to be true, and I can hardly
wait until June! Be sure and be able to come to the prom. It’ll be
fine, I think, and I want to bring _you_ just at the end of a
wonderful year. I often think over what you said on that night and
wonder how much you meant. If it were anyone but you—but you see I
_thought_ you were fickle the first time I saw you and you are so
popular and everthing that I can’t imagine you really liking me
_best_.
Oh, Isabelle, dear—it’s a wonderful night. Somebody is playing “Love
Moon” on a mandolin far across the campus, and the music seems to
bring you into the window. Now he’s playing “Good-by, Boys, I’m
Through,” and how well it suits me. For I am through with
everything. I have decided never to take a cocktail again, and I
know I’ll never again fall in love—I couldn’t—you’ve been too much a
part of my days and nights to ever let me think of another girl. I
meet them all the time and they don’t interest me. I’m not pretending
to be blasé, because it’s not that. It’s just that I’m in love. Oh,
_dearest_ Isabelle (somehow I can’t call you just Isabelle, and I’m
afraid I’ll come out with the “dearest” before your family this
June), you’ve got to come to the prom, and then I’ll come up to your
house for a day and everything’ll be perfect....

And so on in an eternal monotone that seemed to both of them
infinitely charming, infinitely new.

June came and the days grew so hot and lazy that they could not
worry even about exams, but spent dreamy evenings on the court of
Cottage, talking of long subjects until the sweep of country
toward Stony Brook became a blue haze and the lilacs were white
around tennis-courts, and words gave way to silent cigarettes....
Then down deserted Prospect and along McCosh with song everywhere
around them, up to the hot joviality of Nassau Street.

Tom D’Invilliers and Amory walked late in those days. A gambling
fever swept through the sophomore class and they bent over the
bones till three o’clock many a sultry night. After one session
they came out of Sloane’s room to find the dew fallen and the
stars old in the sky.

“Let’s borrow bicycles and take a ride,” Amory suggested.

“All right. I’m not a bit tired and this is almost the last night
of the year, really, because the prom stuff starts Monday.”

They found two unlocked bicycles in Holder Court and rode out
about half-past three along the Lawrenceville Road.

“What are you going to do this summer, Amory?”

“Don’t ask me—same old things, I suppose. A month or two in Lake
Geneva—I’m counting on you to be there in July, you know—then
there’ll be Minneapolis, and that means hundreds of summer hops,
parlor-snaking, getting bored—But oh, Tom,” he added suddenly,
“hasn’t this year been slick!”

“No,” declared Tom emphatically, a new Tom, clothed by Brooks,
shod by Franks, “I’ve won this game, but I feel as if I never
want to play another. You’re all right—you’re a rubber ball, and
somehow it suits you, but I’m sick of adapting myself to the
local snobbishness of this corner of the world. I want to go
where people aren’t barred because of the color of their neckties
and the roll of their coats.”

“You can’t, Tom,” argued Amory, as they rolled along through the
scattering night; “wherever you go now you’ll always
unconsciously apply these standards of ‘having it’ or ‘lacking
it.’ For better or worse we’ve stamped you; you’re a Princeton
type!”

“Well, then,” complained Tom, his cracked voice rising
plaintively, “why do I have to come back at all? I’ve learned all
that Princeton has to offer. Two years more of mere pedantry and
lying around a club aren’t going to help. They’re just going to
disorganize me, conventionalize me completely. Even now I’m so
spineless that I wonder how I get away with it.”

“Oh, but you’re missing the real point, Tom,” Amory interrupted.
“You’ve just had your eyes opened to the snobbishness of the
world in a rather abrupt manner. Princeton invariably gives the
thoughtful man a social sense.”

“You consider you taught me that, don’t you?” he asked
quizzically, eying Amory in the half dark.

Amory laughed quietly.

“Didn’t I?”

“Sometimes,” he said slowly, “I think you’re my bad angel. I
might have been a pretty fair poet.”

“Come on, that’s rather hard. You chose to come to an Eastern
college. Either your eyes were opened to the mean scrambling
quality of people, or you’d have gone through blind, and you’d
hate to have done that—been like Marty Kaye.”

“Yes,” he agreed, “you’re right. I wouldn’t have liked it. Still,
it’s hard to be made a cynic at twenty.”

“I was born one,” Amory murmured. “I’m a cynical idealist.” He
paused and wondered if that meant anything.

They reached the sleeping school of Lawrenceville, and turned to
ride back.

“It’s good, this ride, isn’t it?” Tom said presently.

“Yes; it’s a good finish, it’s knock-out; everything’s good
to-night. Oh, for a hot, languorous summer and Isabelle!”

“Oh, you and your Isabelle! I’ll bet she’s a simple one... let’s
say some poetry.”

So Amory declaimed “The Ode to a Nightingale” to the bushes they
passed.

“I’ll never be a poet,” said Amory as he finished. “I’m not
enough of a sensualist really; there are only a few obvious
things that I notice as primarily beautiful: women, spring
evenings, music at night, the sea; I don’t catch the subtle
things like ‘silver-snarling trumpets.’ I may turn out an
intellectual, but I’ll never write anything but mediocre poetry.”

They rode into Princeton as the sun was making colored maps of
the sky behind the graduate school, and hurried to the
refreshment of a shower that would have to serve in place of
sleep. By noon the bright-costumed alumni crowded the streets
with their bands and choruses, and in the tents there was great
reunion under the orange-and-black banners that curled and
strained in the wind. Amory looked long at one house which bore
the legend “Sixty-nine.” There a few gray-haired men sat and
talked quietly while the classes swept by in panorama of life.

UNDER THE ARC-LIGHT

Then tragedy’s emerald eyes glared suddenly at Amory over the
edge of June. On the night after his ride to Lawrenceville a
crowd sallied to New York in quest of adventure, and started back
to Princeton about twelve o’clock in two machines. It had been a
gay party and different stages of sobriety were represented.
Amory was in the car behind; they had taken the wrong road and
lost the way, and so were hurrying to catch up.

It was a clear night and the exhilaration of the road went to
Amory’s head. He had the ghost of two stanzas of a poem forming
in his mind. ...

So the gray car crept nightward in the dark and there was no life
stirred as it went by.... As the still ocean paths before the shark
in starred and glittering waterways, beauty-high, the moon-swathed
trees divided, pair on pair, while flapping nightbirds cried across
the air....
A moment by an inn of lamps and shades, a yellow inn under a yellow
moon—then silence, where crescendo laughter fades... the car swung
out again to the winds of June, mellowed the shadows where the
distance grew, then crushed the yellow shadows into blue....

They jolted to a stop, and Amory peered up, startled. A woman was
standing beside the road, talking to Alec at the wheel. Afterward
he remembered the harpy effect that her old kimono gave her, and
the cracked hollowness of her voice as she spoke:

“You Princeton boys?”

“Yes.”

“Well, there’s one of you killed here, and two others about
dead.”

“_My God!_”

“Look!” She pointed and they gazed in horror. Under the full
light of a roadside arc-light lay a form, face downward in a
widening circle of blood.

They sprang from the car. Amory thought of the back of that
head—that hair—that hair... and then they turned the form over.

“It’s Dick—Dick Humbird!”

“Oh, Christ!”

“Feel his heart!”

Then the insistent voice of the old crone in a sort of croaking
triumph:

“He’s quite dead, all right. The car turned over. Two of the men
that weren’t hurt just carried the others in, but this one’s no
use.”

Amory rushed into the house and the rest followed with a limp
mass that they laid on the sofa in the shoddy little front
parlor. Sloane, with his shoulder punctured, was on another
lounge. He was half delirious, and kept calling something about a
chemistry lecture at 8:10.

“I don’t know what happened,” said Ferrenby in a strained voice.
“Dick was driving and he wouldn’t give up the wheel; we told him
he’d been drinking too much—then there was this damn curve—oh, my
_God!_...” He threw himself face downward on the floor and broke
into dry sobs.

The doctor had arrived, and Amory went over to the couch, where
some one handed him a sheet to put over the body. With a sudden
hardness, he raised one of the hands and let it fall back
inertly. The brow was cold but the face not expressionless. He
looked at the shoe-laces—Dick had tied them that morning. _He_
had tied them—and now he was this heavy white mass. All that
remained of the charm and personality of the Dick Humbird he had
known—oh, it was all so horrible and unaristocratic and close to
the earth. All tragedy has that strain of the grotesque and
squalid—so useless, futile... the way animals die.... Amory was
reminded of a cat that had lain horribly mangled in some alley of
his childhood.

“Some one go to Princeton with Ferrenby.”

Amory stepped outside the door and shivered slightly at the late
night wind—a wind that stirred a broken fender on the mass of
bent metal to a plaintive, tinny sound.

CRESCENDO!

Next day, by a merciful chance, passed in a whirl. When Amory was
by himself his thoughts zigzagged inevitably to the picture of
that red mouth yawning incongruously in the white face, but with
a determined effort he piled present excitement upon the memory
of it and shut it coldly away from his mind.

Isabelle and her mother drove into town at four, and they rode up
smiling Prospect Avenue, through the gay crowd, to have tea at
Cottage. The clubs had their annual dinners that night, so at
seven he loaned her to a freshman and arranged to meet her in the
gymnasium at eleven, when the upper classmen were admitted to the
freshman dance. She was all he had expected, and he was happy and
eager to make that night the centre of every dream. At nine the
upper classes stood in front of the clubs as the freshman
torchlight parade rioted past, and Amory wondered if the
dress-suited groups against the dark, stately backgrounds and
under the flare of the torches made the night as brilliant to the
staring, cheering freshmen as it had been to him the year before.

The next day was another whirl. They lunched in a gay party of
six in a private dining-room at the club, while Isabelle and
Amory looked at each other tenderly over the fried chicken and
knew that their love was to be eternal. They danced away the prom
until five, and the stags cut in on Isabelle with joyous abandon,
which grew more and more enthusiastic as the hour grew late, and
their wines, stored in overcoat pockets in the coat room, made
old weariness wait until another day. The stag line is a most
homogeneous mass of men. It fairly sways with a single soul. A
dark-haired beauty dances by and there is a half-gasping sound as
the ripple surges forward and some one sleeker than the rest
darts out and cuts in. Then when the six-foot girl (brought by
Kaye in your class, and to whom he has been trying to introduce
you all evening) gallops by, the line surges back and the groups
face about and become intent on far corners of the hall, for
Kaye, anxious and perspiring, appears elbowing through the crowd
in search of familiar faces.

“I say, old man, I’ve got an awfully nice—”

“Sorry, Kaye, but I’m set for this one. I’ve got to cut in on a
fella.”

“Well, the next one?”

“What—ah—er—I swear I’ve got to go cut in—look me up when she’s
got a dance free.”

It delighted Amory when Isabelle suggested that they leave for a
while and drive around in her car. For a delicious hour that
passed too soon they glided the silent roads about Princeton and
talked from the surface of their hearts in shy excitement. Amory
felt strangely ingenuous and made no attempt to kiss her.

Next day they rode up through the Jersey country, had luncheon in
New York, and in the afternoon went to see a problem play at
which Isabelle wept all through the second act, rather to Amory’s
embarrassment—though it filled him with tenderness to watch her.
He was tempted to lean over and kiss away her tears, and she
slipped her hand into his under cover of darkness to be pressed
softly.

Then at six they arrived at the Borges’ summer place on Long
Island, and Amory rushed up-stairs to change into a dinner coat.
As he put in his studs he realized that he was enjoying life as
he would probably never enjoy it again. Everything was hallowed
by the haze of his own youth. He had arrived, abreast of the best
in his generation at Princeton. He was in love and his love was
returned. Turning on all the lights, he looked at himself in the
mirror, trying to find in his own face the qualities that made
him see clearer than the great crowd of people, that made him
decide firmly, and able to influence and follow his own will.
There was little in his life now that he would have changed. ...
Oxford might have been a bigger field.

Silently he admired himself. How conveniently well he looked, and
how well a dinner coat became him. He stepped into the hall and
then waited at the top of the stairs, for he heard footsteps
coming. It was Isabelle, and from the top of her shining hair to
her little golden slippers she had never seemed so beautiful.

“Isabelle!” he cried, half involuntarily, and held out his arms.
As in the story-books, she ran into them, and on that
half-minute, as their lips first touched, rested the high point
of vanity, the crest of his young egotism.