This Side of Paradise (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) (39 page)

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
¹⁰
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,
^aq
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—its 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.

“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.”

Amory paused and decided that it wasn’t such a bad phrase. “Some men,” he continued, “escape the grip. Maybe their wives have no social ambitions; maybe they’ve hit a sentence or two in a ‘dangerous book’ that pleased them; maybe they started on the treadmill as I did and were knocked off. Anyway, they’re the congressmen you can’t bribe, the Presidents who aren’t politicians, the writers, speakers, scientists, statesmen who aren’t just popular grab-bags for a half-dozen women and children.”

“He’s the natural radical?”

“Yes,” said Amory. “He may vary from the disillusioned critic like old Thornton Hancock, all the way to Trotsky. Now this spiritually unmarried man hasn’t direct power, for unfortunately the spiritually married man, as a by-product of his money chase, has garnered in the great newspaper, the popular magazine, the influential weekly— so that Mrs. Newspaper, Mrs. Magazine, Mrs. Weekly can have a better limousine than those oil people across the street or those cement people ’round the corner.”

“Why not?”

“It makes wealthy men the keepers of the world’s intellectual conscience and, of course, a man who has money under one set of social institutions quite naturally can’t risk his family’s happiness by letting the clamor for another appear in his newspaper.”

“But it appears,” said the big man.

“Where?—in the discredited mediums. Rotten cheap-papered weeklies.”

“All right—go on.”

“Well, my first point is that through a mixture of conditions of which the family is the first, there are these two sorts of brains. One sort takes human nature as it finds it, uses its timidity, its weakness, and its strength for its own ends. Opposed is the man who, being spiritually unmarried, continually seeks for new systems that will control or counteract human nature. His problem is harder. It is not life that’s complicated, it’s the struggle to guide and control life. That is his struggle. He is a part of progress—the spiritually married man is not.”

The big man produced three big cigars, and proffered them on his huge palm. The little man took one, Amory shook his head and reached for a cigarette.

“Go on talking,” said the big man. “I’ve been wanting to hear one of you fellows.”

“Modern life,” began Amory again, “changes no longer century by century, but year by year, ten times faster than it ever has berbre—populations doubling, civilizations unified more closely with other civilizations, economic interdependence, racial questions, and—we’re
dawdling
along. My idea is that we’ve got to go very much faster.” He slightly emphasized the last words and the chauffeur unconsciously increased the speed of the car. Amory and the big man laughed; the little man laughed, too, after a pause.

“Every child,” said Amory, “should have an equal start. If his father can endow him with a good physique and his mother with some common sense in his early education, that should be his heritage. If the father can’t give him a good physique, if the mother has spent in chasing men the years in which she should have been preparing herself to educate her children, so much the worse for the child. He shouldn’t be artificially bolstered up with money, sent to these horrible tutoring schools, dragged through college ... Every boy ought to have an equal start.”

“All right,” said the big man, his goggles indicating neither approval nor objection.

“Next I’d have a fair trial of government ownership of all industries.”

“That’s been proven a failure.”

“No—it merely failed. If we had government ownership we’d have the best analytical business minds in the government working for something besides themselves. We’d have Mackays instead of Burlesons; we’d have Morgans in the Treasury Department; we’d have Hills running interstate commerce. We’d have the best lawyers in the Senate.”

“They wouldn’t give their best efforts for nothing. McAdoo—”

“No,” said Amory, shaking his head. “Money isn’t the only stimulus that brings out the best that’s in a man, even in America.”

“You said a while ago that it was.”

“It is, right now. But if it were made illegal to have more than a certain amount the best men would all flock for the one other reward which attracts humanity—honor.”

The big man made a sound that was very like
boo.

“That’s the silliest thing you’ve said yet.”

“No, it isn’t silly. It’s quite plausible. If you’d gone to college you’d have been struck by the fact that the men there would work twice as hard for any one of a hundred petty honors as those other men did who were earning their way through.”

“Kids—child’s play!” scoffed his antagonist.

“Not by a darned sight—unless we’re all children. Did you ever see a grown man when he’s trying for a secret society—or a rising family whose name is up at some club? They’ll jump when they hear the sound of the word. The idea that to make a man work you’ve got to hold gold in front of his eyes is a growth, not an axiom. We’ve done that for so long that we’ve forgotten there’s any other way. We’ve made a world where that’s necessary. Let me tell you”—Amory became emphatic—“if there were ten men insured against either wealth or starvation, and offered a green ribbon for five hours’ work a day and a blue ribbon for ten hours’ work a day, nine out of ten of them would be trying for the blue ribbon. That competitive instinct only wants a badge. If the size of their house is the badge they’ll sweat their heads off for that. If it’s only a blue ribbon, I damn near believe they’ll work just as hard. They have in other ages.

“I don’t agree with you.”

“I know it,” said Amory nodding sadly. “It doesn’t matter any more though. I think these people are going to come and take what they want pretty soon.”

A fierce hiss came from the little man.

“Ah, but you’ve taught them their use.”

The big man shook his head.

“In this country there are enough property owners not to permit that sort of thing.”

Amory wished he knew the statistics of property owners and non-property owners; he decided to change the subject.

But the big man was aroused.

“When you talk of ‘taking things away,’ you’re on dangerous ground.”

“How can they get it without taking it? For years people have been stalled off with promises. Socialism may not be progress, but the threat of the red flag is certainly the inspiring force of all reform. You’ve got to be sensational to get attention.”