The Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald. Knowledge house
bet—I suppose so.”
“If you don’t see, tell me. I’m here to show you.”
“Well, Mr. Rooney, if you don’t mind, I wish you’d go over that again.”
“Gladly. Now here’s ‘A’ …”
The room was a study in stupidity—two huge stands for paper, Mr. Rooney in his shirt-sleeves in front of them, and slouched around on chairs, a dozen men: Fred Sloane, the pitcher, who absolutely had to get eligible; “Slim” Langueduc, who would beat Yale this fall, if only he could master a poor fifty per cent; McDowell, gay young sophomore, who thought it was quite a sporting thing to be tutoring here with all these prominent athletes.
“Those poor birds who haven’t a cent to tutor, and have to study during the term are the ones I pity,” he announced to Amory one day, with a flaccid camaraderie in the droop of the cigarette from his pale lips. “I should think it would be such a bore, there’s so much else to do in New York during the term. I suppose they don’t know what they miss, anyhow.” There was such an air of “you and I” about Mr. McDowell that Amory very nearly pushed him out of the open window when he said this…. Next February his mother would wonder why he didn’t make a club and increase his allowance … simple little nut….
Through the smoke and the air of solemn, dense earnestness that filled the room would come the inevitable helpless cry:
“I don’t get it! Repeat that, Mr. Rooney!” Most of them were so stupid or careless that they wouldn’t admit when they didn’t understand, and Amory was of the latter. He found it impossible to study conic sections; something in their calm and tantalizing respectability breathing defiantly through Mr. Rooney’s fetid parlors distorted their equations into insoluble anagrams. He made a last night’s effort with the proverbial wet towel, and then blissfully took the exam, wondering unhappily why all the color and ambition of the spring before had faded out. Somehow, with the defection of Isabelle the idea of undergraduate success had loosed its grasp on his imagination, and he contemplated a possible failure to pass off his condition with equanimity, even though it would arbitrarily mean his removal from the Princetonian board and the slaughter of his chances for the Senior Council.
There was always his luck.
He yawned, scribbled his honor pledge on the cover, and sauntered from the room.
“If you don’t pass it,” said the newly arrived Alec as they sat on the window-seat of Amory’s room and mused upon a scheme of wall decoration, “you’re the world’s worst goopher. Your stock will go down like an elevator at the club and on the campus.”
“Oh, hell, I know it. Why rub it in?”
“’Cause you deserve it. Anybody that’d risk what you were in line for ought to be ineligible for Princetonian chairman.”
“Oh, drop the subject,” Amory protested. “Watch and wait and shut up. I don’t want every one at the club asking me about it, as if I were a prize potato being fattened for a vegetable show.”
One evening a week later Amory stopped below his own window on the way to Renwick’s, and, seeing a light, called up:
“Oh, Tom, any mail?”
Alec’s head appeared against the yellow square of light.
“Yes, your result’s here.”
His heart clamored violently.
“What is it, blue or pink?”
“Don’t know. Better come up.”
He walked into the room and straight over to the table, and then suddenly noticed that there were other people in the room.
“’Lo, Kerry.” He was most polite. “Ah, men of Princeton.” They seemed to be mostly friends, so he picked up the envelope marked “Registrar’s Office,” and weighed it nervously.
“We have here quite a slip of paper.”
“Open it, Amory.”
“Just to be dramatic, I’ll let you know that if it’s blue, my name is withdrawn from the editorial board of the Prince, and my short career is over.”
He paused, and then saw for the first time Ferrenby’s eyes, wearing a hungry look and watching him eagerly. Amory returned the gaze pointedly.
“Watch my face, gentlemen, for the primitive emotions.”
He tore it open and held the slip up to the light.
“Well?”
“Pink or blue?”
“Say what it is.”
“We’re all ears, Amory.”
“Smile or swear—or something.”
There was a pause … a small crowd of seconds swept by … then he looked again and another crowd went on into time.
“Blue as the sky, gentlemen….”
Aftermath.
What Amory did that year from early September to late in the spring was so purposeless and inconsecutive that it seems scarcely worth recording. He was, of course, immediately sorry for what he had lost. His philosophy of success had tumbled down upon him, and he looked for the reasons.
“Your own laziness,” said Alec later.
“No—something deeper than that. I’ve begun to feel that I was meant to lose this chance.”
“They’re rather off you at the club, you know; every man that doesn’t come through makes our crowd just so much weaker.”
“I hate that point of view.”
“Of course, with a little effort you could still stage a comeback.”
“No—I’m through—as far as ever being a power in college is concerned.”
“But, Amory, honestly, what makes me the angriest isn’t the fact that you won’t be chairman of the Prince and on the Senior Council, but just that you didn’t get down and pass that exam.”
“Not me,” said Amory slowly; “I’m mad at the concrete thing. My own idleness was quite in accord with my system, but the luck broke.”
“Your system broke, you mean.”
“Maybe.”
“Well, what are you going to do? Get a better one quick, or just bum around for two more years as a has-been?”
“I don’t know yet …”
“Oh, Amory, buck up!”
“Maybe.”
Amory’s point of view, though dangerous, was not far from the true one. If his reactions to his environment could be tabulated, the chart would have appeared like this, beginning with his earliest years:
1. The fundamental Amory.
2. Amory plus Beatrice.
3. Amory plus Beatrice plus Minneapolis.
Then St. Regis’ had pulled him to pieces and started him over again:
4. Amory plus St. Regis’.
5. Amory plus St. Regis’ plus Princeton.
That had been his nearest approach to success through conformity. The fundamental Amory, idle, imaginative, rebellious, had been nearly snowed under. He had conformed, he had succeeded, but as his imagination was neither satisfied nor grasped by his own success, he had listlessly, half-accidentally chucked the whole thing and become again:
6. The fundamental Amory.