<p>His father died quietly and inconspicuously at Thanksgiving. The
incongruity of death with either the beauties of Lake Geneva or with his
mother's dignified, reticent attitude diverted him, and he looked at the
funeral with an amused tolerance. He decided that burial was after all
preferable to cremation, and he smiled at his old boyhood choice, slow
oxidation in the top of a tree. The day after the ceremony he was amusing
himself in the great library by sinking back on a couch in graceful
mortuary attitudes, trying to determine whether he would, when his day
came, be found with his arms crossed piously over his chest (Monsignor
Darcy had once advocated this posture as being the most distinguished), or
with his hands clasped behind his head, a more pagan and Byronic attitude.</p>
<p>What interested him much more than the final departure of his father from
things mundane was a tri-cornered conversation between Beatrice, Mr.
Barton, of Barton and Krogman, their lawyers, and himself, that took place
several days after the funeral. For the first time he came into actual
cognizance of the family finances, and realized what a tidy fortune had
once been under his father's management. He took a ledger labelled "1906"
and ran through it rather carefully. The total expenditure that year had
come to something over one hundred and ten thousand dollars. Forty
thousand of this had been Beatrice's own income, and there had been no
attempt to account for it: it was all under the heading, "Drafts, checks,
and letters of credit forwarded to Beatrice Blaine." The dispersal of the
rest was rather minutely itemized: the taxes and improvements on the Lake
Geneva estate had come to almost nine thousand dollars; the general
up-keep, including Beatrice's electric and a French car, bought that year,
was over thirty-five thousand dollars. The rest was fully taken care of,
and there were invariably items which failed to balance on the right side
of the ledger.</p>
<p>In the volume for 1912 Amory was shocked to discover the decrease in the
number of bond holdings and the great drop in the income. In the case of
Beatrice's money this was not so pronounced, but it was obvious that his
father had devoted the previous year to several unfortunate gambles in
oil. Very little of the oil had been burned, but Stephen Blaine had been
rather badly singed. The next year and the next and the next showed
similar decreases, and Beatrice had for the first time begun using her own
money for keeping up the house. Yet her doctor's bill for 1913 had been
over nine thousand dollars.</p>
<p>About the exact state of things Mr. Barton was quite vague and confused.
There had been recent investments, the outcome of which was for the
present problematical, and he had an idea there were further speculations
and exchanges concerning which he had not been consulted.</p>
<p>It was not for several months that Beatrice wrote Amory the full
situation. The entire residue of the Blaine and O'Hara fortunes consisted
of the place at Lake Geneva and approximately a half million dollars,
invested now in fairly conservative six-per-cent holdings. In fact,
Beatrice wrote that she was putting the money into railroad and street-car
bonds as fast as she could conveniently transfer it.</p>
<p>"I am quite sure," she wrote to Amory, "that if there is one<br/>
thing we can be positive of, it is that people will not stay in<br/>
one place. This Ford person has certainly made the most of that<br/>
idea. So I am instructing Mr. Barton to specialize on such things<br/>
as Northern Pacific and these Rapid Transit Companies, as they<br/>
call the street-cars. I shall never forgive myself for not buying<br/>
Bethlehem Steel. I've heard the most fascinating stories. You<br/>
must go into finance, Amory. I'm sure you would revel in it.<br/>
You start as a messenger or a teller, I believe, and from that you<br/>
go up—almost indefinitely. I'm sure if I were a man I'd love the<br/>
handling of money; it has become quite a senile passion with me.<br/>
Before I get any farther I want to discuss something. A Mrs. Bispam,<br/>
an overcordial little lady whom I met at a tea the other day,<br/>
told me that her son, he is at Yale, wrote her that all the<br/>
boys there wore their summer underwear all during the winter,<br/>
and also went about with their heads wet and in low shoes on the<br/>
coldest days. Now, Amory, I don't know whether that is a fad at<br/>
Princeton too, but I don't want you to be so foolish. It not only<br/>
inclines a young man to pneumonia and infantile paralysis, but to<br/>
all forms of lung trouble, to which you are particularly<br/>
inclined. You cannot experiment with your health. I have found<br/>
that out. I will not make myself ridiculous as some mothers no<br/>
doubt do, by insisting that you wear overshoes, though I remember<br/>
one Christmas you wore them around constantly without a single<br/>
buckle latched, making such a curious swishing sound, and you<br/>
refused to buckle them because it was not the thing to do. The<br/>
very next Christmas you would not wear even rubbers, though I<br/>
begged you. You are nearly twenty years old now, dear, and I<br/>
can't be with you constantly to find whether you are doing the<br/>
sensible thing.<br/>
<br/>
"This has been a very <i>practical</i> letter. I warned you in my last<br/>
that the lack of money to do the things one wants to makes one<br/>
quite prosy and domestic, but there is still plenty for<br/>
everything if we are not too extravagant. Take care of yourself,<br/>
my dear boy, and do try to write at least <i>once</i> a week, because I<br/>
imagine all sorts of horrible things if I don't hear from you.<br/>
Affectionately, MOTHER."<br/>
<br/></p>
<hr />
<p>FIRST APPEARANCE OF THE TERM "PERSONAGE"</p>
<p>Monsignor Darcy invited Amory up to the Stuart palace on the Hudson for a
week at Christmas, and they had enormous conversations around the open
fire. Monsignor was growing a trifle stouter and his personality had
expanded even with that, and Amory felt both rest and security in sinking
into a squat, cushioned chair and joining him in the middle-aged sanity of
a cigar.</p>
<p>"I've felt like leaving college, Monsignor."</p>
<p>"Why?"</p>
<p>"All my career's gone up in smoke; you think it's petty and all that, but—"</p>
<p>"Not at all petty. I think it's most important. I want to hear the whole
thing. Everything you've been doing since I saw you last."</p>
<p>Amory talked; he went thoroughly into the destruction of his egotistic
highways, and in a half-hour the listless quality had left his voice.</p>
<p>"What would you do if you left college?" asked Monsignor.</p>
<p>"Don't know. I'd like to travel, but of course this tiresome war prevents
that. Anyways, mother would hate not having me graduate. I'm just at sea.
Kerry Holiday wants me to go over with him and join the Lafayette
Esquadrille."</p>
<p>"You know you wouldn't like to go."</p>
<p>"Sometimes I would—to-night I'd go in a second."</p>
<p>"Well, you'd have to be very much more tired of life than I think you are.
I know you."</p>
<p>"I'm afraid you do," agreed Amory reluctantly. "It just seemed an easy way
out of everything—when I think of another useless, draggy year."</p>
<p>"Yes, I know; but to tell you the truth, I'm not worried about you; you
seem to me to be progressing perfectly naturally."</p>
<p>"No," Amory objected. "I've lost half my personality in a year."</p>
<p>"Not a bit of it!" scoffed Monsignor. "You've lost a great amount of
vanity and that's all."</p>
<p>"Lordy! I feel, anyway, as if I'd gone through another fifth form at St.
Regis's."</p>
<p>"No." Monsignor shook his head. "That was a misfortune; this has been a
good thing. Whatever worth while comes to you, won't be through the
channels you were searching last year."</p>
<p>"What could be more unprofitable than my present lack of pep?"</p>
<p>"Perhaps in itself... but you're developing. This has given you time to
think and you're casting off a lot of your old luggage about success and
the superman and all. People like us can't adopt whole theories, as you
did. If we can do the next thing, and have an hour a day to think in, we
can accomplish marvels, but as far as any high-handed scheme of blind
dominance is concerned—we'd just make asses of ourselves."</p>
<p>"But, Monsignor, I can't do the next thing."</p>
<p>"Amory, between you and me, I have only just learned to do it myself. I
can do the one hundred things beyond the next thing, but I stub my toe on
that, just as you stubbed your toe on mathematics this fall."</p>
<p>"Why do we have to do the next thing? It never seems the sort of thing I
should do."</p>
<p>"We have to do it because we're not personalities, but personages."</p>
<p>"That's a good line—what do you mean?"</p>
<p>"A personality is what you thought you were, what this Kerry and Sloane
you tell me of evidently are. Personality is a physical matter almost
entirely; it lowers the people it acts on—I've seen it vanish in a
long sickness. But while a personality is active, it overrides 'the next
thing.' Now a personage, on the other hand, gathers. He is never thought
of apart from what he's done. He's a bar on which a thousand things have
been hung—glittering things sometimes, as ours are; but he uses
those things with a cold mentality back of them."</p>
<p>"And several of my most glittering possessions had fallen off when I
needed them." Amory continued the simile eagerly.</p>
<p>"Yes, that's it; when you feel that your garnered prestige and talents and
all that are hung out, you need never bother about anybody; you can cope
with them without difficulty."</p>
<p>"But, on the other hand, if I haven't my possessions, I'm helpless!"</p>
<p>"Absolutely."</p>
<p>"That's certainly an idea."</p>
<p>"Now you've a clean start—a start Kerry or Sloane can
constitutionally never have. You brushed three or four ornaments down,
and, in a fit of pique, knocked off the rest of them. The thing now is to
collect some new ones, and the farther you look ahead in the collecting
the better. But remember, do the next thing!"</p>
<p>"How clear you can make things!"</p>
<p>So they talked, often about themselves, sometimes of philosophy and
religion, and life as respectively a game or a mystery. 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.</p>
<p>"Why do I make lists?" Amory asked him one night. "Lists of all sorts of
things?"</p>
<p>"Because you're a mediaevalist," Monsignor answered. "We both are. It's
the passion for classifying and finding a type."</p>
<p>"It's a desire to get something definite."</p>
<p>"It's the nucleus of scholastic philosophy."</p>
<p>"I was beginning to think I was growing eccentric till I came up here. It
was a pose, I guess."</p>
<p>"Don't worry about that; for you not posing may be the biggest pose of
all. Pose—"</p>
<p>"Yes?"</p>
<p>"But do the next thing."</p>
<p>After Amory returned to college he received several letters from Monsignor
which gave him more egotistic food for consumption.</p>
<p>I am afraid that I gave you too much assurance of your inevitable<br/>
safety, and you must remember that I did that through faith in<br/>
your springs of effort; not in the silly conviction that you will<br/>
arrive without struggle. Some nuances of character you will have<br/>
to take for granted in yourself, though you must be careful in<br/>
confessing them to others. You are unsentimental, almost incapable<br/>
of affection, astute without being cunning and vain without being<br/>
proud.<br/>
<br/>
Don't let yourself feel worthless; often through life you will<br/>
really be at your worst when you seem to think best of yourself;<br/>
and don't worry about losing your "personality," as you persist<br/>
in calling it; at fifteen you had the radiance of early morning,<br/>
at twenty you will begin to have the melancholy brilliance of<br/>
the moon, and when you are my age you will give out, as I do,<br/>
the genial golden warmth of 4 P.M.<br/>
<br/>
If you write me letters, please let them be natural ones. Your<br/>
last, that dissertation on architecture, was perfectly awful—<br/>
so "highbrow" that I picture you living in an intellectual and<br/>
emotional vacuum; and beware of trying to classify people too<br/>
definitely into types; you will find that all through their youth<br/>
they will persist annoyingly in jumping from class to class, and<br/>
by pasting a supercilious label on every one you meet you are<br/>
merely packing a Jack-in-the-box that will spring up and leer at<br/>
you when you begin to come into really antagonistic contact with<br/>
the world. An idealization of some such a man as Leonardo da<br/>
Vinci would be a more valuable beacon to you at present.<br/>
<br/>
You are bound to go up and down, just as I did in my youth, but<br/>
do keep your clarity of mind, and if fools or sages dare to<br/>
criticise don't blame yourself too much.<br/>
<br/>
You say that convention is all that really keeps you straight in<br/>
this "woman proposition"; but it's more than that, Amory; it's<br/>
the fear that what you begin you can't stop; you would run amuck,<br/>
and I know whereof I speak; it's that half-miraculous sixth sense<br/>
by which you detect evil, it's the half-realized fear of God in<br/>
your heart.<br/>
<br/>
Whatever your metier proves to be—religion, architecture,<br/>
literature—I'm sure you would be much safer anchored to the<br/>
Church, but I won't risk my influence by arguing with you even<br/>
though I am secretly sure that the "black chasm of Romanism"<br/>
yawns beneath you. Do write me soon.<br/>
<br/>
With affectionate regards, THAYER DARCY.<br/></p>
<p>Even Amory's reading paled during this period; he delved further into the
misty side streets of literature: Huysmans, Walter Pater, Theophile
Gautier, and the racier sections of Rabelais, Boccaccio, Petronius, and
Suetonius. One week, through general curiosity, he inspected the private
libraries of his classmates and found Sloane's as typical as any: sets of
Kipling, O. Henry, John Fox, Jr., and Richard Harding Davis; "What Every
Middle-Aged Woman Ought to Know," "The Spell of the Yukon"; a "gift" copy
of James Whitcomb Riley, an assortment of battered, annotated schoolbooks,
and, finally, to his surprise, one of his own late discoveries, the
collected poems of Rupert Brooke.</p>
<p>Together with Tom D'Invilliers, he sought among the lights of Princeton
for some one who might found the Great American Poetic Tradition.</p>
<p>The undergraduate body itself was rather more interesting that year than
had been the entirely Philistine Princeton of two years before. Things had
livened surprisingly, though at the sacrifice of much of the spontaneous
charm of freshman year. In the old Princeton they would never have
discovered Tanaduke Wylie. Tanaduke was a sophomore, with tremendous ears
and a way of saying, "The earth swirls down through the ominous moons of
preconsidered generations!" that made them vaguely wonder why it did not
sound quite clear, but never question that it was the utterance of a
supersoul. At least so Tom and Amory took him. They told him in all
earnestness that he had a mind like Shelley's, and featured his ultrafree
free verse and prose poetry in the Nassau Literary Magazine. But
Tanaduke's genius absorbed the many colors of the age, and he took to the
Bohemian life, to their great disappointment. He talked of Greenwich
Village now instead of "noon-swirled moons," and met winter muses,
unacademic, and cloistered by Forty-second Street and Broadway, instead of
the Shelleyan dream-children with whom he had regaled their expectant
appreciation. So they surrendered Tanaduke to the futurists, deciding that
he and his flaming ties would do better there. Tom gave him the final
advice that he should stop writing for two years and read the complete
works of Alexander Pope four times, but on Amory's suggestion that Pope
for Tanaduke was like foot-ease for stomach trouble, they withdrew in
laughter, and called it a coin's toss whether this genius was too big or
too petty for them.</p>
<p>Amory rather scornfully avoided the popular professors who dispensed easy
epigrams and thimblefuls of Chartreuse to groups of admirers every night.
He was disappointed, too, at the air of general uncertainty on every
subject that seemed linked with the pedantic temperament; his opinions
took shape in a miniature satire called "In a Lecture-Room," which he
persuaded Tom to print in the Nassau Lit.</p>
<p>"Good-morning, Fool...<br/>
Three times a week<br/>
You hold us helpless while you speak,<br/>
Teasing our thirsty souls with the<br/>
Sleek 'yeas' of your philosophy...<br/>
Well, here we are, your hundred sheep,<br/>
Tune up, play on, pour forth... we sleep...<br/>
You are a student, so they say;<br/>
You hammered out the other day<br/>
A syllabus, from what we know<br/>
Of some forgotten folio;<br/>
You'd sniffled through an era's must,<br/>
Filling your nostrils up with dust,<br/>
And then, arising from your knees,<br/>
Published, in one gigantic sneeze...<br/>
But here's a neighbor on my right,<br/>
An Eager Ass, considered bright;<br/>
Asker of questions.... How he'll stand,<br/>
With earnest air and fidgy hand,<br/>
After this hour, telling you<br/>
He sat all night and burrowed through<br/>
Your book.... Oh, you'll be coy and he<br/>
Will simulate precosity,<br/>
And pedants both, you'll smile and smirk,<br/>
And leer, and hasten back to work....<br/>
<br/>
'Twas this day week, sir, you returned<br/>
A theme of mine, from which I learned<br/>
(Through various comment on the side<br/>
Which you had scrawled) that I defied<br/>
The <i>highest rules of criticism</i><br/>
For <i>cheap</i> and <i>careless</i> witticism....<br/>
'Are you quite sure that this could be?'<br/>
And<br/>
'Shaw is no authority!'<br/>
But Eager Ass, with what he's sent,<br/>
Plays havoc with your best per cent.<br/>
<br/>
Still—still I meet you here and there...<br/>
When Shakespeare's played you hold a chair,<br/>
And some defunct, moth-eaten star<br/>
Enchants the mental prig you are...<br/>
A radical comes down and shocks<br/>
The atheistic orthodox?<br/>
You're representing Common Sense,<br/>
Mouth open, in the audience.<br/>
And, sometimes, even chapel lures<br/>
That conscious tolerance of yours,<br/>
That broad and beaming view of truth<br/>
(Including Kant and General Booth...)<br/>
And so from shock to shock you live,<br/>
A hollow, pale affirmative...<br/>
<br/>
The hour's up... and roused from rest<br/>
One hundred children of the blest<br/>
Cheat you a word or two with feet<br/>
That down the noisy aisle-ways beat...<br/>
Forget on <i>narrow-minded earth</i><br/>
The Mighty Yawn that gave you birth."<br/></p>
<p>In April, Kerry Holiday left college and sailed for France to enroll in
the Lafayette Esquadrille. Amory's envy and admiration of this step was
drowned in an experience of his own to which he never succeeded in giving
an appropriate value, but which, nevertheless, haunted him for three years
afterward.</p>
<hr />
<p>THE DEVIL</p>
<div style="break-after:column;"></div><br />