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 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 any rate, 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 a moral 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
smutty anecdotes, 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 the French
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 dazzled by 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
of Roosevelt, 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 muttered aloud. “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.”