III
Emmet Roget, twenty, and Potter Osprey, nineteen, both juniors at the University, were sitting naked one afternoon on the long parapet which formed one of the banks of Milton’s abandoned quarry. Behind them the stone wall fell away a sheer twenty feet to the gulch below. In front, licking the tops of the three-foot barrier, lay the broad sheet of deep, clear water. Their white bodies dripped opaline flakes in the sunset. From time to time they shivered in the chilly late September wind.
A pale, luminous dory of a moon floated low in the delicately blue and pink expanse of sky that lay over the town. The surrounding flat country was infinitely still, infinitely peaceful.
Potter suddenly droned forth in the melancholy baritone the two affected when reading Swinburne and other modern poets:
“The wandering moon, an optimistic spriteEtched a pale border ’round the face of night....”
“The wandering moon, an optimistic spriteEtched a pale border ’round the face of night....”
“The wandering moon, an optimistic sprite
Etched a pale border ’round the face of night....”
Emmet was silent for a moment, and then as though the sound of the quotation had travelled to him from a distance, burst out:
“Gosh, man, where did you get that?”
The other reached over boisterously and clapped his friend’s shoulder.
“A trial of my own! All you need to be a poet is to suffer from insomnia, the way I did the other night.”
“Well, you can write.”
“Eh? But I’d so much rather paint.”
“Better look out. You may have more talent for writing than for painting.” Potter sensed a criticism in the remark, which he privately resented.
“No, the thing I’ll never be able to do is the thing I’m going to do.”
Emmet did not reply at once, and his sleepy blue eyes, long and narrow between the lids, rested upon an indefinable point of distance. The wind ruffled his dark curly hair that grew low on the brow and temples. He was the handsomer of the two.
“Damn specialists and specialism,” he said. “I keep thinking about a synthesis of the arts. Take the theatre, for example. Why not do something like Wagner did—in a lighter, more lyric vein? Bring all the arts together and create a new art? I hate this little business of one man with a pen, one man with a brush and another with a piano, none of them understanding each other.”
“A synthesis of the arts is contradictory,” said Osprey. “Only Nature can accomplish it, at anyrate, and Nature and art are sworn enemies. Nature takes a tree and gives it form and colour; its leaves rustle and its branches are wood-winds. Then in certain lights the tree will have the elusive, the startling quality of poetry. There you have sculpture, painting, music and literature—but it isn’t art, and, thank God, art never will be such a pudding.”
“Nevertheless,” replied Roget, without controversy and as if to himself, “Nevertheless something can be done that way. What about the church in Renaissance Italy and elsewhere? That was a synthesis—a man didn’t paint just to be painting something of his own. He painted for God’s sake.”
It was really cold by now, and a moment later they were hastily dressing. Roget murmured:
“‘The wandering moon, an optimistic sprite, etched a pale border ’round the face of night.’Ce n’est pas mal.It’s pictorial and yet it’s literary too. Perhaps you will use words to fix your notions for painting. What’s that, in a sense, but synthesis, old-timer?” he finished jubilantly.
They went home in the dusk. These were the perfect hours college gave them....
The rural University town of the central states, in the period when electric lighting and telephones were young, when the automobile was as yet a rarity, and the popular senior took his best girl out riding Sundays behind a smart livery tandem,may have been hideous to modern eyes with its muddy streets, its wooden dwellings and its old-time murky brick and brownstone halls, but it had a mellow and quiet charm that comported well with the spirit of scholarship.
This charm we may assume has been swept away forever. Gasoline and commercial growth, endowments, tudorized architecture, prohibition, short-skirted and long-headed women, energetic chancellors, a wealthier class of students, up-to-date burgher emporiums, moving picture palazzos, Grecian banks, and other vanities of the wicked age have hidden that erstwhile scene, with its air of leisure and moderation, beneath a slick financial veneer that nothing but the fall of federal empire and the end of progress will ever wipe off.
When Potter Osprey arrived at the Athens of his native state it was still a function of one’s education to sit with the more or less elect twice a week in one of the three saloons and beer up, to the point where one navigated with difficulty the crossings of perilously high stepping stones and sometimes fell off into honest Athenian mud, which accumulated in viscid pools a foot deep.
If one was only a freshman one might have to be contented with the private room of the “Bucket of Blood”—in a small rear section of which negroes were allowed to drink. Later on, you aimed for the private room at Steve Ball’s. The Y.M.C.A. and the Cadet Corps, the latter also amoral training camp under the guise of military orders, throve, but only among the groundlings. Two obscure fraternities out of twelve admitted members who would stoop to either, unless they were recommended by extraordinary prowess in other and more popular directions.
In those days the dirt-stained farmers in jack-boots came to town Saturday morning with heavy carts of solid produce and departed at nightfall with almost equally heavy burdens of liquid joy. Afternoon strollers got their legs inextricably mixed with frantic, squealing hogs, and the smell of fresh manure rose to the fifth story of the Attic House, the tallest building on the local Broadway. Nowadays the farmers come snorting in in Cadillacs as often as they please and go home sober to tot up the double entry ledger with “mommer.” It is a changed world and undoubtedly a more leisurely one for college disciplinary committees.
Potter’s progress for a year had consisted in desperate efforts to escape his classes toward the end of the week, and to regain some hold on them at the beginning. As often happens, in spite of such practices, or perhaps because of the extra spurts of effort which they made necessary, he regularly stood well in his studies. His second year, however, from the standpoint of conduct, was an improvement over the first. Roget put in an appearance, and Osprey wearied somewhat of smuttyanecdotes, at the telling of which he was never skilful, and found a genuine interest growing in him for his language classes, and even for mathematics.
In the entire town, beside the poet, there had been two people in whom he took an interest. One was a thin, rather angular but not uncomely instructress in the art classes, who had come from New York and the Art Students’ League. Potter never probed her jolly, untroubled character very deeply, but she had a firm pencil stroke that he admired, and after a few talks with her he discovered that she breathed a freer air than the folk at Athens. To his fraternity brothers she was a frump, socially impossible. The feminine ideal of the day was the type of Miss Carroll of Carrollton, or Miss Brown from Brownhaven, rich father, proud virtue, sentimental possibilities and skill in the small town graces.
His second admiration was a grey-haired, lean descendant of one of the oldest families in town, a certain Oliver Pruyd, whose hawk-beaked face habitually wore an ironic grin. He was supposed to correspond with the metropolitan newspapers, and his unofficial scholarship had achieved a certain subrosa reputation. But his gains in his vocation were obviously slender and it was not his scholarship that brought him distinction. Pruyd was the only known addict to the use of morphine of whom the community could boast.
Osprey’s acquaintance with him had been casual. There was something sinister in Pruyd’s mocking expression and wrinkled, flavescent skin. Once, however, the younger man had achieved the brilliance of seeking him out in his small den over the pool and billiard hall, an indescribably neat and carefully arranged place, walled with books and piles of periodicals. Pruyd proved stimulating through three drinks, introducing many hints of literary sources and art lore hitherto strange to his companion. In the days of his family’s wealth he had ruined his usefulness by overlong haunting of the byways of Europe.
Beginning with the fourth bourbon, however, the conversation descended to common levels, and the affair ended with their staggering down Broadway like any two other louts expelled from Steve Ball’s at the closing hour.
The only other consolation was the college library. In its actual precincts he was often uncomfortable because he was critically inspected by elderly persons at the desk for his curious taste in books. This alternately intimidated and enraged him—and almost barred him from the use of the library. But from it he obtained Pater’s “Marius” and “Renaissance,” prints of Hogarth and Daumier and Michelangelo, “Tom Jones” and Balzac, Rousseau and Voltaire, stray bits of Wilde and Beardsley, and sprinklings of theFrench symbolists—shuddersome bombs in those days.
The art class, one of the main objectives of his course (and the sop which his father had thrown him in urging him to take a well-rounded education before he settled down to his choice) was a puerile and primary bore after the first day, a repetition of the drawing of casts in charcoal, to which he had devoted two years at high school—with a prim sketch hour thrown in twice a week in the evening, the members of the class serving as models for fifteen minute studies.
A few weeks after the conversation with Emmet Roget at Milton’s Pond, Potter was sitting with a full assemblage of his fraternity brothers at a breakfast of oatmeal swimming in blue milk, biscuits and rancid butter—which was all the country town could furnish for some curious reason—and pork chops well immersed in grease. The house manager that season was an economist, loudly cursed at every meal, but immensely appreciated at the end of the month when the pro-rated statements came around.
They were not a well-to-do nor a polished crowd. Raw-boned, plebeian, familiar—tobacco-chewers from the agricultural towns getting their first taste of a dress suit—they nevertheless had their pride and social standards. Potter, for example, though he liked them well enough—indeed had been dazzledby several of their more suave and persuasive members during the first few weeks after his matriculation—was now, on account of those standards, nursing a private feud against the whole organization. The cause of this feud was their refusal to invite Emmet Roget to join, a man, thought he, better bred than any of them. They had taken in two gawky, mannerless Freshmen that year, sons of zinc barons from the mining counties, but they would not have Roget.
Potter understood the reason well enough, but his resentment was all the more keen on that account. Roget was rejected for personal characteristics which he himself would like to have exhibited oftener. He, also, did not quite belong in the group, and his influence, which for some reason was not inconsiderable, would have waned quickly had he been more frank about his own tastes. Roget did not lack that frankness. He was poor, but poverty was no bar in that fraternity. The trouble was that he was not ashamed of having won the Whittier prize for verse in his freshman year. He had needed the money. He pronounced his name in the French manner and sat in a corner quietly cynical at dances. He was pretty generally admired by girls, but that could be a fault in a person you instinctively disliked; and he turned up one evening at a smoker wearing a wrist watch. In the first administration ofRoosevelt, a man was either a “good scout” or a “crumb,” and the best looking and brainiest chap on earth, if he did these things, was a crumb.
The crowd was beginning to leave the breakfast table, some of them rushing off to eight o’clock classes and others moiling onto the porch for the first Bull Durham “drag” of the day, and bawling a good-natured “hello, men” to students hurrying past from other houses.
Potter had an eight o’clock class and was late. As he started off, however, he took up a letter addressed to him, from the table in the hall, and stopped in his tracks. He stared again at the superscription and the eight o’clock class dropped completely from his mind. The letter was in a hand that he knew well, and the sight of it instantly smote him with fear. He looked about to see if any one was watching and turned to flee to the bathroom upstairs, the only place in the house where privacy was possible. On second thought he walked quietly by the group on the porch and went up the street. A ten minute lope brought him to the deserted little nine-hole golf course outside of town. He could not help thinking how benign, how untroubled the fields were in the brisk, delicious morning. They calmed his pounding blood and sent a wave of optimism through him.
“What a fool I was to miss my class,” he mutteredaloud. “It may not be anything at all.” He sat down on a sandbox and hurriedly opened the letter.
“Dear Potter,” it ran, “It’s happened as I was afraid. I’m nearly three months gone. Dr. Schottman won’t help me. He says he never does that. I haven’t got much money, and don’t know what I’m to do.“Yours truly,“Ellen.”
“Dear Potter,” it ran, “It’s happened as I was afraid. I’m nearly three months gone. Dr. Schottman won’t help me. He says he never does that. I haven’t got much money, and don’t know what I’m to do.
“Yours truly,“Ellen.”