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  THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE SLICKER

  From the scoffing superiority of sixth-form year and success Amory looked back with cynical wonder on his status of the year before. He was changed as completely as Amory Blaine could ever be changed. Amory plus Beatrice plus two years in Minneapolis — these had been his ingredients when he entered St. Regis’. But the Minneapolis years were not a thick enough overlay to conceal the “Amory plus Beatrice” from the ferreting eyes of a boarding-school, so St. Regis’ had very painfully drilled Beatrice out of him, and begun to lay down new and more conventional planking on the fundamental Amory. But both St. Regis’ and Amory were unconscious of the fact that this fundamental Amory had not in himself changed. Those qualities for which he had suffered, his moodiness, his tendency to pose, his laziness, and his love of playing the fool, were now taken as a matter of course, recognized eccentricities in a star quarter-back, a clever actor, and the editor of the St. Regis Tattler: it puzzled him to see impressionable small boys imitating the very vanities that had not long ago been contemptible weaknesses.

  After the football season he slumped into dreamy content. The night of the pre-holiday dance he slipped away and went early to bed for the pleasure of hearing the violin music cross the grass and come surging in at his window. Many nights he lay there dreaming awake of secret cafes in Mont Martre, where ivory women delved in romantic mysteries with diplomats and soldiers of fortune, while orchestras played Hungarian waltzes and the air was thick and exotic with intrigue and moonlight and adventure. In the spring he read “L’Allegro,” by request, and was inspired to lyrical outpourings on the subject of Arcady and the pipes of Pan. He moved his bed so that the sun would wake him at dawn that he might dress and go out to the archaic swing that hung from an apple-tree near the sixth-form house. Seating himself in this he would pump higher and higher until he got the effect of swinging into the wide air, into a fairyland of piping satyrs and nymphs with the faces of fair-haired girls he passed in the streets of Eastchester. As the swing reached its highest point, Arcady really lay just over the brow of a certain hill, where the brown road dwindled out of sight in a golden dot.

  He read voluminously all spring, the beginning of his eighteenth year: “The Gentleman from Indiana,” “The New Arabian Nights,” “The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne,” “The Man Who Was Thursday,” which he liked without understanding; “Stover at Yale,” that became somewhat of a text-book; “Dombey and Son,” because he thought he really should read better stuff; Robert Chambers, David Graham Phillips, and E. Phillips Oppenheim complete, and a scattering of Tennyson and Kipling. Of all his class work only “L’Allegro” and some quality of rigid clarity in solid geometry stirred his languid interest.

  As June drew near, he felt the need of conversation to formulate his own ideas, and, to his surprise, found a co-philosopher in Rahill, the president of the sixth form. In many a talk, on the highroad or lying belly-down along the edge of the baseball diamond, or late at night with their cigarettes glowing in the dark, they threshed out the questions of school, and there was developed the term “slicker.”

  “Got tobacco?” whispered Rahill one night, putting his head inside the door five minutes after lights.

  “Sure.”

  “I’m coming in.”

  “Take a couple of pillows and lie in the window-seat, why don’t you.”

  Amory sat up in bed and lit a cigarette while Rahill settled for a conversation. Rahill’s favorite subject was the respective futures of the sixth form, and Amory never tired of outlining them for his benefit.

  “Ted Converse? ‘At’s easy. He’ll fail his exams, tutor all summer at Harstrum’s, get into Sheff with about four conditions, and flunk out in the middle of the freshman year. Then he’ll go back West and raise hell for a year or so; finally his father will make him go into the paint business. He’ll marry and have four sons, all bone heads. He’ll always think St. Regis’s spoiled him, so he’ll send his sons to day school in Portland. He’ll die of locomotor ataxia when he’s forty-one, and his wife will give a baptizing stand or whatever you call it to the Presbyterian Church, with his name on it — “

  “Hold up, Amory. That’s too darned gloomy. How about yourself?”

  “I’m in a superior class. You are, too. We’re philosophers.”

  “I’m not.”

  “Sure you are. You’ve got a darn good head on you.” But Amory knew that nothing in the abstract, no theory or generality, ever moved Rahill until he stubbed his toe upon the concrete minutiae of it.

  “Haven’t,” insisted Rahill. “I let people impose on me here and don’t get anything out of it. I’m the prey of my friends, damn it — do their lessons, get ‘em out of trouble, pay ‘em stupid summer visits, and always entertain their kid sisters; keep my temper when they get selfish and then they think they pay me back by voting for me and telling me I’m the ‘big man’ of St. Regis’s. I want to get where everybody does their own work and I can tell people where to go. I’m tired of being nice to every poor fish in school.”

  “You’re not a slicker,” said Amory suddenly.

  “A what?”

  “A slicker.”

  “What the devil’s that?”

  “Well, it’s something that — that — there’s a lot of them. You’re not one, and neither am I, though I am more than you are.”

  “Who is one? What makes you one?”

  Amory considered.

  “Why — why, I suppose that the sign of it is when a fellow slicks his hair back with water.”

  “Like Carstairs?”

  “Yes — sure. He’s a slicker.”

  They spent two evenings getting an exact definition. The slicker was good-looking or clean-looking; he had brains, social brains, that is, and he used all means on the broad path of honesty to get ahead, be popular, admired, and never in trouble. He dressed well, was particularly neat in appearance, and derived his name from the fact that his hair was inevitably worn short, soaked in water or tonic, parted in the middle, and slicked back as the current of fashion dictated. The slickers of that year had adopted tortoise-shell spectacles as badges of their slickerhood, and this made them so easy to recognize that Amory and Rahill never missed one. The slicker seemed distributed through school, always a little wiser and shrewder than his contemporaries, managing some team or other, and keeping his cleverness carefully concealed.

  Amory found the slicker a most valuable classification until his junior year in college, when the outline became so blurred and indeterminate that it had to be subdivided many times, and became only a quality. Amory’s secret ideal had all the slicker qualifications, but, in addition, courage and tremendous brains and talents — also Amory conceded him a bizarre streak that was quite irreconcilable to the slicker proper.

  This was a first real break from the hypocrisy of school tradition. The slicker was a definite element of success, differing intrinsically from the prep school “big man.”

  “THE SLICKER”

  1. Clever sense of social values.

  2. Dresses well. Pretends that dress is superficial — but knows that it isn’t.

  3. Goes into such activities as he can shine in.

  4. Gets to college and is, in a worldly way, successful.

  5. Hair slicked.

  “THE BIG MAN”

  1. Inclined to stupidity and unconscious of social values.

  2. Thinks dress is superficial, and is inclined to be

  careless about it.

  3. Goes out for everything from a sense of duty.

  4. Gets to college and has a problematical future. Feels lost

  without his circle, and always says that school days were

  happiest, after all. Goes back to school and makes speeches

  about what St. Regis’s boys are doing.

  5. Hair not slicked.

  Amory had decided definitely on Princeton, even though he would be the only boy entering that year from St. Regis’. Yale had a romance and glamour from the
tales of Minneapolis, and St. Regis’ men who had been “tapped for Skull and Bones,” but Princeton drew him most, with its atmosphere of bright colors and its alluring reputation as the pleasantest country club in America. Dwarfed by the menacing college exams, Amory’s school days drifted into the past. Years afterward, when he went back to St. Regis’, he seemed to have forgotten the successes of sixth-form year, and to be able to picture himself only as the unadjustable boy who had hurried down corridors, jeered at by his rabid contemporaries mad with common sense.

  CHAPTER 2. Spires and Gargoyles

  At first Amory noticed only the wealth of sunshine creeping across the long, green swards, dancing on the leaded window-panes, and swimming around the tops of spires and towers and battlemented walls. Gradually he realized that he was really walking up University Place, self-conscious about his suitcase, developing a new tendency to glare straight ahead when he passed any one. Several times he could have sworn that men turned to look at him critically. He wondered vaguely if there was something the matter with his clothes, and wished he had shaved that morning on the train. He felt unnecessarily stiff and awkward among these white-flannelled, bareheaded youths, who must be juniors and seniors, judging from the savoir faire with which they strolled.

  He found that 12 University Place was a large, dilapidated mansion, at present apparently uninhabited, though he knew it housed usually a dozen freshmen. After a hurried skirmish with his landlady he sallied out on a tour of exploration, but he had gone scarcely a block when he became horribly conscious that he must be the only man in town who was wearing a hat. He returned hurriedly to 12 University, left his derby, and, emerging bareheaded, loitered down Nassau Street, stopping to investigate a display of athletic photographs in a store window, including a large one of Allenby, the football captain, and next attracted by the sign “Jigger Shop” over a confectionary window. This sounded familiar, so he sauntered in and took a seat on a high stool.

  “Chocolate sundae,” he told a colored person.

  “Double chocolate jiggah? Anything else?”

  “Why — yes.”

  “Bacon bun?”

  “Why — yes.”

  He munched four of these, finding them of pleasing savor, and then consumed another double-chocolate jigger before ease descended upon him. After a cursory inspection of the pillow-cases, leather pennants, and Gibson Girls that lined the walls, he left, and continued along Nassau Street with his hands in his pockets. Gradually he was learning to distinguish between upper classmen and entering men, even though the freshman cap would not appear until the following Monday. Those who were too obviously, too nervously at home were freshmen, for as each train brought a new contingent it was immediately absorbed into the hatless, white-shod, book-laden throng, whose function seemed to be to drift endlessly up and down the street, emitting great clouds of smoke from brand-new pipes. By afternoon Amory realized that now the newest arrivals were taking him for an upper classman, and he tried conscientiously to look both pleasantly blasé and casually critical, which was as near as he could analyze the prevalent facial expression.

  At five o’clock he felt the need of hearing his own voice, so he retreated to his house to see if any one else had arrived. Having climbed the rickety stairs he scrutinized his room resignedly, concluding that it was hopeless to attempt any more inspired decoration than class banners and tiger pictures. There was a tap at the door.

  “Come in!”

  A slim face with gray eyes and a humorous smile appeared in the doorway.

  “Got a hammer?”

  “No — sorry. Maybe Mrs. Twelve, or whatever she goes by, has one.”

  The stranger advanced into the room.

  “You an inmate of this asylum?”

  Amory nodded.

  “Awful barn for the rent we pay.”

  Amory had to agree that it was.

  “I thought of the campus,” he said, “but they say there’s so few freshmen that they’re lost. Have to sit around and study for something to do.”

  The gray-eyed man decided to introduce himself.

  “My name’s Holiday.”

  “Blaine’s my name.”

  They shook hands with the fashionable low swoop. Amory grinned.

  “Where’d you prep?”

  “Andover — where did you?”

  “St. Regis’s.”

  “Oh, did you? I had a cousin there.”

  They discussed the cousin thoroughly, and then Holiday announced that he was to meet his brother for dinner at six.

  “Come along and have a bite with us.”

  “All right.”

  At the Kenilworth Amory met Burne Holiday — he of the gray eyes was Kerry — and during a limpid meal of thin soup and anaemic vegetables they stared at the other freshmen, who sat either in small groups looking very ill at ease, or in large groups seeming very much at home.

  “I hear Commons is pretty bad,” said Amory.

  “That’s the rumor. But you’ve got to eat there — or pay anyways.”

  “Crime!”

  “Imposition!”

  “Oh, at Princeton you’ve got to swallow everything the first year. It’s like a damned prep school.”

  Amory agreed.

  “Lot of pep, though,” he insisted. “I wouldn’t have gone to Yale for a million.”

  “Me either.”

  “You going out for anything?” inquired Amory of the elder brother.

  “Not me — Burne here is going out for the Prince — the Daily Princetonian, you know.”

  “Yes, I know.”

  “You going out for anything?”

  “Why — yes. I’m going to take a whack at freshman football.”

  “Play at St. Regis’s?”

  “Some,” admitted Amory depreciatingly, “but I’m getting so damned thin.”

  “You’re not thin.”

  “Well, I used to be stocky last fall.”

  “Oh!”

  After supper they attended the movies, where Amory was fascinated by the glib comments of a man in front of him, as well as by the wild yelling and shouting.

  “Yoho!”

  “Oh, honey-baby — you’re so big and strong, but oh, so gentle!”

  “Clinch!”

  “Oh, Clinch!”

  “Kiss her, kiss ‘at lady, quick!”

  “Oh-h-h — !”

  A group began whistling “By the Sea,” and the audience took it up noisily. This was followed by an indistinguishable song that included much stamping and then by an endless, incoherent dirge.

  “Oh-h-h-h-h

  She works in a Jam Factoree

  And — that-may-be-all-right

  But you can’t-fool-me

  For I know — DAMN — WELL

  That she DON’T-make-jam-all-night!

  Oh-h-h-h!”

  As they pushed out, giving and receiving curious impersonal glances, Amory decided that he liked the movies, wanted to enjoy them as the row of upper classmen in front had enjoyed them, with their arms along the backs of the seats, their comments Gaelic and caustic, their attitude a mixture of critical wit and tolerant amusement.

  “Want a sundae — I mean a jigger?” asked Kerry.

  “Sure.”

  They suppered heavily and then, still sauntering, eased back to 12.

  “Wonderful night.”

  “It’s a whiz.”

  “You men going to unpack?”

  “Guess so. Come on, Burne.”

  Amory decided to sit for a while on the front steps, so he bade them good night.

  The great tapestries of trees had darkened to ghosts back at the last edge of twilight. The early moon had drenched the arches with pale blue, and, weaving over the night, in and out of the gossamer rifts of moon, swept a song, a song with more than a hint of sadness, infinitely transient, infinitely regretful.

  He remembered that an alumnus of the nineties had told him of one of Booth Tarkington’s amusements: standing in mid-campus in th
e small hours and singing tenor songs to the stars, arousing mingled emotions in the couched undergraduates according to the sentiment of their moods.

  Now, far down the shadowy line of University Place a white-clad phalanx broke the gloom, and marching figures, white-shirted, white-trousered, swung rhythmically up the street, with linked arms and heads thrown back:

  “Going back — going back,

  Going — back — to — Nas-sau — Hall,

  Going back — going back —

  To the — Best — Old — Place — of — All.

  Going back — going back,

  From all — this — earth-ly — ball,

  We’ll — clear — the — track — as — we — go — back —

  Going — back — to — Nas-sau — Hall!”

  Amory closed his eyes as the ghostly procession drew near. The song soared so high that all dropped out except the tenors, who bore the melody triumphantly past the danger-point and relinquished it to the fantastic chorus. Then Amory opened his eyes, half afraid that sight would spoil the rich illusion of harmony.

  He sighed eagerly. There at the head of the white platoon marched Allenby, the football captain, slim and defiant, as if aware that this year the hopes of the college rested on him, that his hundred-and-sixty pounds were expected to dodge to victory through the heavy blue and crimson lines.