STILL CALM
“Ghosts are such dumb things,” said Alec, “they’re slow-witted. I can always outguess a ghost.”
“How?” asked Tom.
“Well, it depends where. Take a bedroom, for example. If you use any discretion a ghost can never get you in a bedroom.”
“Go on, s’pose you think there’s maybe a ghost in your bedroom—what measures do you take on getting home at night?” demanded Amory, interested.
“Take a stick” answered Alec, with ponderous reverence, “one about the length of a broom-handle. Now, the first thing to do is to get the room cleared—to do this you rush with your eyes closed into your study and turn on the lights—next, approaching the closet, carefully run the stick in the door three or four times. Then, if nothing happens, you can look in. Always, always run the stick in viciously first—never look first!”
“Of course, that’s the ancient Celtic school,” said Tom gravely.
“Yes—but they usually pray first. Anyway, you use this method to clear the closets and also for behind all doors—”
“And the bed,” Amory suggested.
“Oh, Amory, no!” cried Alec in horror. “That isn’t the way—the bed requires different tactics—let the bed alone, as you value your reason—if there is a ghost in the room and that’s only about a third of the time, it is almost always under the bed.”
“Well” Amory began.
Alec waved him into silence.
“Of course you never look. You stand in the middle of the floor and before he knows what you’re going to do make a sudden leap for the bed—never walk near the bed; to a ghost your ankle is your most vulnerable part—once in bed, you’re safe; he may lie around under the bed all night, but you’re safe as daylight. If you still have doubts pull the blanket over your head.”
“All that’s very interesting, Tom.”
“Isn’t it?” Alec beamed proudly. “All my own, too—the Sir Oliver Lodge of the new world.”
Amory was enjoying college immensely again. The sense of going forward in a direct, determined line had come back; youth was stirring and shaking out a few new feathers. He had even stored enough surplus energy to sally into a new pose.
“What’s the idea of all this ‘distracted’ stuff, Amory?” asked Alec one day, and then as Amory pretended to be cramped over his book in a daze: “Oh, don’t try to act Burne, the mystic, to me.”
Amory looked up innocently.
“What?”
“What?” mimicked Alec. “Are you trying to read yourself into a rhapsody with—let’s see the book.”
He snatched it; regarded it derisively.
“Well?” said Amory a little stiffly.
“‘The Life of St. Teresa,’” read Alec aloud. “Oh, my gosh!”
“Say, Alec.”
“What?”
“Does it bother you?”
“Does what bother me?”
“My acting dazed and all that?”
“Why, no—of course it doesn’t bother me.”
“Well, then, don’t spoil it. If I enjoy going around telling people guilelessly that I think I’m a genius, let me do it.”
“You’re getting a reputation for being eccentric,” said Alec, laughing, “if that’s what you mean.”
Amory finally prevailed, and Alec agreed to accept his face value in the presence of others if he was allowed rest periods when they were alone; so Amory “ran it out” at a great rate, bringing the most eccentric characters to dinner, wild-eyed grad students, preceptors with strange theories of God and government, to the cynical amazement of the supercilious Cottage Club.
As February became slashed by sun and moved cheerfully into March, Amory went several times to spend week-ends with Monsignor; once he took Burne, with great success, for he took equal pride and delight in displaying them to each other. Monsignor took him several times to see Thornton Hancock, and once or twice to the house of a Mrs. Lawrence, a type of Rome-haunting American whom Amory liked immediately.
Then one day came a letter from Monsignor, which appended an interesting P. S.:
“Do you know,” it ran, “that your third cousin, Clara Page,
widowed six months and very poor, is living in Philadelphia?
I don’t think you’ve ever met her, but I wish, as a favor to me,
you’d go to see her. To my mind, she’s rather a remarkable woman,
and just about your age.”
Amory sighed and decided to go, as a favor....
CLARA
She was immemorial.... Amory wasn’t good enough for Clara, Clara of ripply golden hair, but then no man was. Her goodness was above the prosy morals of the husband-seeker, apart from the dull literature of female virtue.
Sorrow lay lightly around her, and when Amory found her in Philadelphia he thought her steely blue eyes held only happiness; a latent strength, a realism, was brought to its fullest development by the facts that she was compelled to face. She was alone in the world, with two small children, little money, and, worst of all, a host of friends. He saw her that winter in Philadelphia entertaining a houseful of men for an evening, when he knew she had not a servant in the house except the little colored girl guarding the babies overhead. He saw one of the greatest libertines in that city, a man who was habitually drunk and notorious at home and abroad, sitting opposite her for an evening, discussing girls’ boarding-schools with a sort of innocent excitement. What a twist Clara had to her mind! She could make fascinating and almost brilliant conversation out of the thinnest air that ever floated through a drawing-room.
The idea that the girl was poverty-stricken had appealed to Amory’s sense of situation. He arrived in Philadelphia expecting to be told that 921 Ark Street was in a miserable lane of hovels. He was even disappointed when it proved to be nothing of the sort. It was an old house that had been in her husband’s family for years. An elderly aunt, who objected to having it sold, had put ten years’ taxes with a lawyer and pranced off to Honolulu, leaving Clara to struggle with the heating-problem as best she could. So no wild-haired woman with a hungry baby at her breast and a sad Amelia-like look greeted him. Instead, Amory would have thought from his reception that she had not a care in the world.
A calm virility and a dreamy humor, marked contrasts to her level-headedness—into these moods she slipped sometimes as a refuge. She could do the most prosy things (though she was wise enough never to stultify herself with such “household arts” as knitting and embroidery), yet immediately afterward pick up a book and let her imagination rove as a formless cloud with the wind. Deepest of all in her personality was the golden radiance that she diffused around her. As an open fire in a dark room throws romance and pathos into the quiet faces at its edge, so she cast her lights and shadows around the rooms that held her, until she made of her prosy old uncle a man of quaint and meditative charm, metamorphosed the stray telegraph boy into a Puck-like creature of delightful originality. At first this quality of hers somehow irritated Amory. He considered his own uniqueness sufficient, and it rather embarrassed him when she tried to read new interests into him for the benefit of what other adorers were present. He felt as if a polite but insistent stage-manager were attempting to make him give a new interpretation of a part he had conned for years.
But Clara talking, Clara telling a slender tale of a hatpin and an inebriated man and herself.... People tried afterward to repeat her anecdotes but for the life of them they could make them sound like nothing whatever. They gave her a sort of innocent attention and the best smiles many of them had smiled for long; there were few tears in Clara, but people smiled misty-eyed at her.
Very occasionally Amory stayed for little half-hours after the rest of the court had gone, and they would have bread and jam and tea late in the afternoon or “maple-sugar lunches,” as she called them, at night.
“You are remarkable, aren’t you!” Amory was becoming trite from where he perched in the centre of the dining-room table one six o’clock.
“Not a bit,” she answered. She was searching out napkins in the sideboard. “I’m really most humdrum and commonplace. One of those people who have no interest in anything but their children.”
“Tell that to somebody else,” scoffed Amory. “You know you’re perfectly effulgent.” He asked her the one thing that he knew might embarrass her. It was the remark that the first bore made to Adam.
“Tell me about yourself.” And she gave the answer that Adam must have given.
“There’s nothing to tell.”
But eventually Adam probably told the bore all the things he thought about at night when the locusts sang in the sandy grass, and he must have remarked patronizingly how different he was from Eve, forgetting how different she was from him... at any rate, Clara told Amory much about herself that evening. She had had a harried life from sixteen on, and her education had stopped sharply with her leisure. Browsing in her library, Amory found a tattered gray book out of which fell a yellow sheet that he impudently opened. It was a poem that she had written at school about a gray convent wall on a gray day, and a girl with her cloak blown by the wind sitting atop of it and thinking about the many-colored world. As a rule such sentiment bored him, but this was done with so much simplicity and atmosphere, that it brought a picture of Clara to his mind, of Clara on such a cool, gray day with her keen blue eyes staring out, trying to see her tragedies come marching over the gardens outside. He envied that poem. How he would have loved to have come along and seen her on the wall and talked nonsense or romance to her, perched above him in the air. He began to be frightfully jealous of everything about Clara: of her past, of her babies, of the men and women who flocked to drink deep of her cool kindness and rest their tired minds as at an absorbing play.
“Nobody seems to bore you,” he objected.
“About half the world do,” she admitted, “but I think that’s a pretty good average, don’t you?” and she turned to find something in Browning that bore on the subject. 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. She did it constantly, with such a serious enthusiasm that he grew fond of watching her golden hair bent over a book, brow wrinkled ever so little at hunting her sentence.
Through early March he took to going to Philadelphia for week-ends. Almost always there was some one else there and she seemed not anxious to see him alone, for many occasions presented themselves when a word from her would have given him another delicious half-hour of adoration. But he fell gradually in love and began to speculate wildly on marriage. Though this design flowed through his brain even to his lips, still he knew afterward that the desire had not been deeply rooted. Once he dreamt that it had come true and woke up in a cold panic, for in his dream she had been a silly, flaxen Clara, with the gold gone out of her hair and platitudes falling insipidly from her changeling tongue. 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, and of course there were the ever-present prig and Pharisee—(but Amory never included them as being among the saved).
ST. CECILIA
“Over her gray and velvet dress,
Under her molten, beaten hair,
Color of rose in mock distress
Flushes and fades and makes her fair;
Fills the air from her to him
With light and languor and little sighs,
Just so subtly he scarcely knows...
Laughing lightning, color of rose.”
“Do you like me?”
“Of course I do,” said Clara seriously.
“Why?”
“Well, we have some qualities in common. Things that are spontaneous in each of us—or were originally.”
“You’re implying that I haven’t used myself very well?”
Clara hesitated.
“Well, I can’t judge. A man, of course, has to go through a lot more, and I’ve been sheltered.”
“Oh, don’t stall, please, Clara,” Amory interrupted; “but do talk about me a little, won’t you?”
“Surely, I’d adore to.” She didn’t smile.
“That’s sweet of you. First answer some questions. Am I painfully conceited?”
“Well—no, you have tremendous vanity, but it’ll amuse the people who notice its preponderance.”
“I see.”
“You’re really humble at heart. You sink to the third hell of depression when you think you’ve been slighted. In fact, you haven’t much self-respect.”
“Centre of target twice, Clara. How do you do it? You never let me say a word.”
“Of course not—I can never judge a man while he’s talking. But I’m not through; the reason you have so little real self-confidence, even though you gravely announce to the occasional philistine that you think you’re a genius, is that you’ve attributed all sorts of atrocious faults to yourself and are trying to live up to them. For instance, you’re always saying that you are a slave to high-balls.”
“But I am, potentially.”
“And you say you’re a weak character, that you’ve no will.”
“Not a bit of will—I’m a slave to my emotions, to my likes, to my hatred of boredom, to most of my desires—”
“You are not!” She brought one little fist down onto the other. “You’re a slave, a bound helpless slave to one thing in the world, your imagination.”
“You certainly interest me. If this isn’t boring you, go on.”
“I notice that when you want to stay over an extra day from college you go about it in a sure way. You never decide at first while the merits of going or staying are fairly clear in your mind. You let your imagination shinny on the side of your desires for a few hours, and then you decide. Naturally your imagination, after a little freedom, thinks up a million reasons why you should stay, so your decision when it comes isn’t true. It’s biassed.”
“Yes,” objected Amory, “but isn’t it lack of will-power to let my imagination shinny on the wrong side?”
“My dear boy, there’s your big mistake. This has nothing to do with will-power; that’s a crazy, useless word, anyway; you lack judgment—the judgment to decide at once when you know your imagination will play you false, given half a chance.”
“Well, I’ll be darned!” exclaimed Amory in surprise, “that’s the last thing I expected.”
Clara didn’t gloat. She changed the subject immediately. But she had started him thinking and he believed she was partly right. He felt like a factory-owner who after accusing a clerk of dishonesty finds that his own son, in the office, is changing the books once a week. His poor, mistreated will that he had been holding up to the scorn of himself and his friends, stood before him innocent, and his judgment walked off to prison with the unconfinable imp, imagination, dancing in mocking glee beside him. Clara’s was the only advice he ever asked without dictating the answer himself—except, perhaps, in his talks with Monsignor Darcy.
How he loved to do any sort of thing with Clara! Shopping with her was a rare, epicurean dream. In every store where she had ever traded she was whispered about as the beautiful Mrs. Page.
“I’ll bet she won’t stay single long.”
“Well, don’t scream it out. She ain’t lookin’ for no advice.”
“Ain’t she beautiful!”
(Enter a floor-walker—silence till he moves forward, smirking.)
“Society person, ain’t she?”
“Yeah, but poor now, I guess; so they say.”
“Gee! girls, ain’t she some kid!”
And Clara beamed on all alike. Amory believed that tradespeople gave her discounts, sometimes to her knowledge and sometimes without it. He knew she dressed very well, had always the best of everything in the house, and was inevitably waited upon by the head floor-walker at the very least.
Sometimes they would go to church together on Sunday and he would walk beside her and revel in her cheeks moist from the soft water in the new air. She was very devout, always had been, and God knows what heights she attained and what strength she drew down to herself when she knelt and bent her golden hair into the stained-glass light.
“St. Cecelia,” he cried aloud one day, quite involuntarily, and the people turned and peered, and the priest paused in his sermon and Clara and Amory turned to fiery red.
That was the last Sunday they had, for he spoiled it all that night. He couldn’t help it.
They were walking through the March twilight where it was as warm as June, and the joy of youth filled his soul so that he felt he must speak.
“I think,” he said and his voice trembled, “that if I lost faith in you I’d lose faith in God.”
She looked at him with such a startled face that he asked her the matter.
“Nothing,” she said slowly, “only this: five men have said that to me before, and it frightens me.”
“Oh, Clara, is that your fate!”
She did not answer.
“I suppose love to you is—” he began.
She turned like a flash.
“I have never been in love.”
They walked along, and he realized slowly how much she had told him... never in love.... She seemed suddenly a daughter of light alone. His entity dropped out of her plane and he longed only to touch her dress with almost the realization that Joseph must have had of Mary’s eternal significance. But quite mechanically he heard himself saying:
“And I love you—any latent greatness that I’ve got is... oh, I can’t talk, but Clara, if I come back in two years in a position to marry you—”
She shook her head.
“No,” she said; “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—” She broke off suddenly.
“Amory.”
“What?”
“You’re not in love with me. You never wanted to marry me, did you?”
“It was the twilight,” he said wonderingly. “I didn’t feel as though I were speaking aloud. But I love you—or adore you—or worship you—”
“There you go—running through your catalogue of emotions in five seconds.”
He smiled unwillingly.
“Don’t make me out such a light-weight, Clara; you are depressing sometimes.”
“You’re not a light-weight, of all things,” she said intently, taking his arm and opening wide her eyes—he could see their kindliness in the fading dusk. “A light-weight is an eternal nay.”
“There’s so much spring in the air—there’s so much lazy sweetness in your heart.”
She dropped his arm.
“You’re all fine now, and I feel glorious. Give me a cigarette. You’ve never seen me smoke, have you? Well, I do, about once a month.”
And then that wonderful girl and Amory raced to the corner like two mad children gone wild with pale-blue twilight.
“I’m going to the country for to-morrow,” she announced, as she stood panting, safe beyond the flare of the corner lamp-post. “These days are too magnificent to miss, though perhaps I feel them more in the city.”
“Oh, Clara!” Amory said; “what a devil you could have been if the Lord had just bent your soul a little the other way!”
“Maybe,” she answered; “but I think not. I’m never really wild and never have been. That little outburst was pure spring.”
“And you are, too,” said he.
They were walking along now.
“No—you’re wrong again, how can a person of your own self-reputed brains be so constantly wrong about me? I’m the opposite of everything spring ever stood for. It’s unfortunate, if I happen to look like what pleased some soppy old Greek sculptor, but I assure you that if it weren’t for my face I’d be a quiet nun in the convent without” —then she broke into a run and her raised voice floated back to him as he followed— “my precious babies, which I must go back and see.”
She was the only girl he ever knew with whom he could understand how another man might be preferred. Often Amory met wives whom he had known as debutantes, and looking intently at them imagined that he found something in their faces which said:
“Oh, if I could only have gotten you!” Oh, the enormous conceit of the man!
But that night seemed a night of stars and singing and Clara’s bright soul still gleamed on the ways they had trod.
“Golden, golden is the air—” he chanted to the little pools of water. ... “Golden is the air, golden notes from golden mandolins, golden frets of golden violins, fair, oh, wearily fair.... Skeins from braided basket, mortals may not hold; oh, what young extravagant God, who would know or ask it?... who could give such gold...”