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his father was a grocery clerk who made a fortune in Tacoma real estate and came to New York ten years ago.”
All through the spring Amory had kept up an intermittent correspondence with Isabelle Borgé, punctuated by violent squabbles and chiefly enlivened by his attempts to find new words for love.
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.
“I was born one,” Amory murmured. “I’m a cynical idealist.”
“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.”
Then tragedy’s emerald eyes glared suddenly at Amory over the edge of June.
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.
so useless, futile . . . the way animals die. . . .
The next day was another whirl.
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.
you’re always talking about yourself and I used to like it; now I don’t.”
H e l ay aw ak e in the dark ness and wondered how much he cared—how much of his sudden unhappiness was hurt vanity—whether he was, after all, temperamentally unfitted for romance.
His father died quietly and inconspicuously at Thanksgiving.
Monsignor Darcy invited Amory up to the Stuart palace on the Hudson for a week at Christmas,
The priest seemed to guess Amory’s thoughts before they were clear in his own head, so closely related were their minds in form and groove.
In April, Kerry Holiday left college and sailed for France to enroll in the Lafayette Esquadrille.
Fred Sloane and Phoebe Column were old friends; Axia and Amory new ones.
a face flashed over the two feet, a face pale and distorted with a sort of infinite evil that twisted it like flame in the wind; but he knew, for the half instant that the gong tanged and hummed, that it was the face of Dick Humbird.
“It’s gone now,” came Tom’s voice after a second in a still terror. “Something was looking at you.” Trembling violently, Amory dropped into his chair again. “I’ve got to tell you,” he said. “I’ve had one hell of an experience. I think I’ve—I’ve seen the devil or—something like him.
DURNIG PRINCETON’S TRANSITION PERIOD, THAT IS, DURING AMORY’S LAST two years there, while he saw it change and broaden and live up to its Gothic beauty by better means than night parades, certain individuals arrived who stirred it to its plethoric depths.
The intense power Amory felt later in Burne Holiday differed from the admiration he had had for Humbird. This time it began as purely a mental interest.
Burne was drawing farther and farther away from the world about him. He resigned the vice-presidency of the senior class and took to reading and walking as almost his only pursuits.
He began to be frightfully jealous of everything about Clara: of her past, of her babies, of the men and women who flocked
She was the only person he ever met who could look up passages and quotations to show him in the middle of the conversation, and yet not be irritating to distraction.
he fell gradually in love and began to speculate wildly on marriage.
But she was the first fine woman he ever knew and one of the few good people who ever interested him. She made her goodness such an asset. Amory had decided that most good people either dragged theirs after them as a liability, or else distorted it to artificial geniality,
“You’re a slave, a bound helpless slave to one thing in the world, your imagination.”
your imagination will play you false, given half a chance.”
Clara didn’t gloat. She changed the subject immediately. But she had started him thinking and he believed she was partly right.
Clara’s was the only advice he ever asked without dictating the answer himself— except, perhaps, in his talks with Monsignor Darcy.
She was very devout, always had been,
She turned like a flash. “I have never been in love.”
She seemed suddenly a daughter of light alone.
“I’d never marry again. I’ve got my two children and I want myself for them. I like you—I like all clever men, you more than any—but you know me well enough to know that I’d never marry a clever man—”
“Oh, Clara!” Amory said; “what a devil you could have been if the Lord had just bent your soul a little the other way!”
I’m never really wild and never have been. That little outburst was pure spring.”
He thought how much easier patriotism had been to a homogeneous race,
heroic. The literary students read Rupert Brooke passionately; the lounge-lizards worried over whether the government would permit the English-cut uniform for officers;
Germany stood for everything repugnant to him; for materialism and the direction of tremendous licentious force;
“What are you going to do, Amory?” “Infantry or aviation, I can’t make up my mind—I hate mechanics, but then of course aviation’s the thing for me——”
“The grass is full of ghosts to-night.” “The whole campus is alive with them.”
MAY, 1917-FEBRUARY, 1919 A LETTER DATED JANUARY, 1918, WRITTEN BY MONSIGNOR DARCY TO AMORY, who is a second lieutenant in the 171st Infantry, Port of Embarkation, Camp Mills, Long Island.
Amory—Amory—I feel, somehow, that this is all; one or both of us is not going to last out this war. . . . I’ve been trying to tell you how much this reincarnation of myself in you has meant in the last few years . . . curiously alike we are . . . curiously unlike.
ROSALIND: It’s just—us. We’re pitiful, that’s all. The very qualities I love you for are the ones that will always make you a failure.
It’s been so perfect—you and I. So like a dream that I’d longed for and never thought I’d find. The first real unselfishness I’ve ever felt in my life.
ROSALIND: I’d rather keep it as a beautiful memory—tucked away in my heart.
ROSALIND: I can’t, Amory. I can’t be shut away from the trees and flowers, cooped up in a little flat, waiting for you.
(And deep under the aching sadness that will pass in time, Rosalind feels that she has lost something, she knows not what, she knows not why.)
own a paper that is the intellectual meat and drink of thousands of tired, hurried men, men too involved in the business of modern living to swallow anything but predigested food.
“And that is why I have sworn not to put pen to paper until my ideas either clarify or depart entirely; I have quite enough sins on my soul without putting dangerous, shallow epigrams into people’s heads;
