Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald (Illustrated) (33 page)

Women — of whom he had expected so much; whose beauty he had hoped to transmute into modes of art; whose unfathomable instincts, marvellously incoherent and inarticulate, he had thought to perpetuate in terms of experience — had become merely consecrations to their own posterity. Isabelle, Clara, Rosalind, Eleanor, were all removed by their very beauty, around which men had swarmed, from the possibility of contributing anything but a sick heart and a page of puzzled words to write.

Amory based his loss of faith in help from others on several sweeping syllogisms. Granted that his generation, however bruised and decimated from this Victorian war, were the heirs of progress. Waving aside petty differences of conclusions which, although they might occasionally cause the deaths of several millions of young men, might be explained away — supposing that after all Bernard Shaw and Bernhardi, Bonar Law and Bethmann-Hollweg were mutual heirs of progress if only in agreeing against the ducking of witches — waiving the antitheses and approaching individually these men who seemed to be the leaders, he was repelled by the discrepancies and contradictions in the men themselves.

There was, for example, Thornton Hancock, respected by half the intellectual world as an authority on life, a man who had verified and believed the code he lived by, an educator of educators, an adviser to Presidents — yet Amory knew that this man had, in his heart, leaned on the priest of another religion.

And Monsignor, upon whom a cardinal rested, had moments of strange and horrible insecurity — inexplicable in a religion that explained even disbelief in terms of its own faith: if you doubted the devil it was the devil that made you doubt him. Amory had seen Monsignor go to the houses of stolid philistines, read popular novels furiously, saturate himself in routine, to escape from that horror.

And this priest, a little wiser, somewhat purer, had been, Amory knew, not essentially older than he.

Amory was alone — he had escaped from a small enclosure into a great labyrinth. He was where Goethe was when he began “Faust”; he was where Conrad was when he wrote “Almayer’s Folly.”

Amory said to himself that there were essentially two sorts of people who through natural clarity or disillusion left the enclosure and sought the labyrinth. There were men like Wells and Plato, who had, half unconsciously, a strange, hidden orthodoxy, who would accept for themselves only what could be accepted for all men — incurable romanticists who never, for all their efforts, could enter the labyrinth as stark souls; there were on the other hand sword-like pioneering personalities, Samuel Butler, Renan, Voltaire, who progressed much slower, yet eventually much further, not in the direct pessimistic line of speculative philosophy but concerned in the eternal attempt to attach a positive value to life....

Amory stopped. He began for the first time in his life to have a strong distrust of all generalities and epigrams. They were too easy, too dangerous to the public mind. Yet all thought usually reached the public after thirty years in some such form: Benson and Chesterton had popularized Huysmans and Newman; Shaw had sugar-coated Nietzsche and Ibsen and Schopenhauer. The man in the street heard the conclusions of dead genius through some one else’s clever paradoxes and didactic epigrams.

Life was a damned muddle... a football game with every one off-side and the referee gotten rid of — every one claiming the referee would have been on his side....

Progress was a labyrinth... people plunging blindly in and then rushing wildly back, shouting that they had found it... the invisible king — the elan vital — the principle of evolution... writing a book, starting a war, founding a school....

Amory, even had he not been a selfish man, would have started all inquiries with himself. He was his own best example — sitting in the rain, a human creature of sex and pride, foiled by chance and his own temperament of the balm of love and children, preserved to help in building up the living consciousness of the race.

In self-reproach and loneliness and disillusion he came to the entrance of the labyrinth.

Another dawn flung itself across the river, a belated taxi hurried along the street, its lamps still shining like burning eyes in a face white from a night’s carouse. A melancholy siren sounded far down the river.

MONSIGNOR

Amory kept thinking how Monsignor would have enjoyed his own funeral. It was magnificently Catholic and liturgical. Bishop O’Neill sang solemn high mass and the cardinal gave the final absolutions. Thornton Hancock, Mrs. Lawrence, the British and Italian ambassadors, the papal delegate, and a host of friends and priests were there — yet the inexorable shears had cut through all these threads that Monsignor had gathered into his hands. To Amory it was a haunting grief to see him lying in his coffin, with closed hands upon his purple vestments. His face had not changed, and, as he never knew he was dying, it showed no pain or fear. It was Amory’s dear old friend, his and the others’ — for the church was full of people with daft, staring faces, the most exalted seeming the most stricken.

The cardinal, like an archangel in cope and mitre, sprinkled the holy water; the organ broke into sound; the choir began to sing the Requiem Eternam.

All these people grieved because they had to some extent depended upon Monsignor. Their grief was more than sentiment for the “crack in his voice or a certain break in his walk,” as Wells put it. These people had leaned on Monsignor’s faith, his way of finding cheer, of making religion a thing of lights and shadows, making all light and shadow merely aspects of God. People felt safe when he was near.

Of Amory’s attempted sacrifice had been born merely the full realization of his disillusion, but of Monsignor’s funeral was born the romantic elf who was to enter the labyrinth with him. He found something that he wanted, had always wanted and always would want — not to be admired, as he had feared; not to be loved, as he had made himself believe; but to be necessary to people, to be indispensable; he remembered the sense of security he had found in Burne.

Life opened up in one of its amazing bursts of radiance and Amory suddenly and permanently rejected an old epigram that had been playing listlessly in his mind: “Very few things matter and nothing matters very much.”

On the contrary, Amory felt an immense desire to give people a sense of security.

THE BIG MAN WITH GOGGLES

On the day that Amory started on his walk to Princeton the sky was a colorless vault, cool, high and barren of the threat of rain. It was a gray day, that least fleshly of all weathers; a day of dreams and far hopes and clear visions. It was a day easily associated with those abstract truths and purities that dissolve in the sunshine or fade out in mocking laughter by the light of the moon. The trees and clouds were carved in classical severity; the sounds of the countryside had harmonized to a monotone, metallic as a trumpet, breathless as the Grecian urn.

The day had put Amory in such a contemplative mood that he caused much annoyance to several motorists who were forced to slow up considerably or else run him down. So engrossed in his thoughts was he that he was scarcely surprised at that strange phenomenon — cordiality manifested within fifty miles of Manhattan — when a passing car slowed down beside him and a voice hailed him. He looked up and saw a magnificent Locomobile in which sat two middle-aged men, one of them small and anxious looking, apparently an artificial growth on the other who was large and begoggled and imposing.

“Do you want a lift?” asked the apparently artificial growth, glancing from the corner of his eye at the imposing man as if for some habitual, silent corroboration.

“You bet I do. Thanks.”

The chauffeur swung open the door, and, climbing in, Amory settled himself in the middle of the back seat. He took in his companions curiously. The chief characteristic of the big man seemed to be a great confidence in himself set off against a tremendous boredom with everything around him. That part of his face which protruded under the goggles was what is generally termed “strong”; rolls of not undignified fat had collected near his chin; somewhere above was a wide thin mouth and the rough model for a Roman nose, and, below, his shoulders collapsed without a struggle into the powerful bulk of his chest and belly. He was excellently and quietly dressed. Amory noticed that he was inclined to stare straight at the back of the chauffeur’s head as if speculating steadily but hopelessly some baffling hirsute problem.

The smaller man was remarkable only for his complete submersion in the personality of the other. He was of that lower secretarial type who at forty have engraved upon their business cards: “Assistant to the President,” and without a sigh consecrate the rest of their lives to second-hand mannerisms.

“Going far?” asked the smaller man in a pleasant disinterested way.

“Quite a stretch.”

“Hiking for exercise?”

“No,” responded Amory succinctly, “I’m walking because I can’t afford to ride.”

“Oh.”

Then again:

“Are you looking for work? Because there’s lots of work,” he continued rather testily. “All this talk of lack of work. The West is especially short of labor.” He expressed the West with a sweeping, lateral gesture. Amory nodded politely.

“Have you a trade?”

No — Amory had no trade.

“Clerk, eh?”

No — Amory was not a clerk.

“Whatever your line is,” said the little man, seeming to agree wisely with something Amory had said, “now is the time of opportunity and business openings.” He glanced again toward the big man, as a lawyer grilling a witness glances involuntarily at the jury.

Amory decided that he must say something and for the life of him could think of only one thing to say.

“Of course I want a great lot of money — “

The little man laughed mirthlessly but conscientiously.

“That’s what every one wants nowadays, but they don’t want to work for it.”

“A very natural, healthy desire. Almost all normal people want to be rich without great effort — except the financiers in problem plays, who want to ‘crash their way through.’ Don’t you want easy money?”

“Of course not,” said the secretary indignantly.

“But,” continued Amory disregarding him, “being very poor at present I am contemplating socialism as possibly my forte.”

Both men glanced at him curiously.

“These bomb throwers — “ The little man ceased as words lurched ponderously from the big man’s chest.

“If I thought you were a bomb thrower I’d run you over to the Newark jail. That’s what I think of Socialists.”

Amory laughed.

“What are you,” asked the big man, “one of these parlor Bolsheviks, one of these idealists? I must say I fail to see the difference. The idealists loaf around and write the stuff that stirs up the poor immigrants.”

“Well,” said Amory, “if being an idealist is both safe and lucrative, I might try it.”

“What’s your difficulty? Lost your job?”

“Not exactly, but — well, call it that.”

“What was it?”

“Writing copy for an advertising agency.”

“Lots of money in advertising.”

Amory smiled discreetly.

“Oh, I’ll admit there’s money in it eventually. Talent doesn’t starve any more. Even art gets enough to eat these days. Artists draw your magazine covers, write your advertisements, hash out rag-time for your theatres. By the great commercializing of printing you’ve found a harmless, polite occupation for every genius who might have carved his own niche. But beware the artist who’s an intellectual also. The artist who doesn’t fit — the Rousseau, the Tolstoi, the Samuel Butler, the Amory Blaine — “

“Who’s he?” demanded the little man suspiciously.

“Well,” said Amory, “he’s a — he’s an intellectual personage not very well known at present.”

The little man laughed his conscientious laugh, and stopped rather suddenly as Amory’s burning eyes turned on him.

“What are you laughing at?”

“These
intellectual
people — “

“Do you know what it means?”

The little man’s eyes twitched nervously.

“Why, it
usually
means — “

“It
always
means brainy and well-educated,” interrupted Amory. “It means having an active knowledge of the race’s experience.” Amory decided to be very rude. He turned to the big man. “The young man,” he indicated the secretary with his thumb, and said young man as one says bell-boy, with no implication of youth, “has the usual muddled connotation of all popular words.”

“You object to the fact that capital controls printing?” said the big man, fixing him with his goggles.

“Yes — and I object to doing their mental work for them. It seemed to me that the root of all the business I saw around me consisted in overworking and underpaying a bunch of dubs who submitted to it.”

“Here now,” said the big man, “you’ll have to admit that the laboring man is certainly highly paid — five and six hour days — it’s ridiculous. You can’t buy an honest day’s work from a man in the trades-unions.”

“You’ve brought it on yourselves,” insisted Amory. “You people never make concessions until they’re wrung out of you.”

“What people?”

“Your class; the class I belonged to until recently; those who by inheritance or industry or brains or dishonesty have become the moneyed class.”

“Do you imagine that if that road-mender over there had the money he’d be any more willing to give it up?”

“No, but what’s that got to do with it?”

The older man considered.

“No, I’ll admit it hasn’t. It rather sounds as if it had though.”

“In fact,” continued Amory, “he’d be worse. The lower classes are narrower, less pleasant and personally more selfish — certainly more stupid. But all that has nothing to do with the question.”

“Just exactly what is the question?”

Here Amory had to pause to consider exactly what the question was.

AMORY COINS A PHRASE

“When life gets hold of a brainy man of fair education,” began Amory slowly, “that is, when he marries he becomes, nine times out of ten, a conservative as far as existing social conditions are concerned. He may be unselfish, kind-hearted, even just in his own way, but his first job is to provide and to hold fast. His wife shoos him on, from ten thousand a year to twenty thousand a year, on and on, in an enclosed treadmill that hasn’t any windows. He’s done! Life’s got him! He’s no help! He’s a spiritually married man.”