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Young People\'s Pride

S >> Stephen Vincent Benet >> Young People\'s Pride



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[ILLUSTRATION: "WHAT'S THAT?" SAID MRS. SEVERANCE SHARPLY] YOUNG PEOPLE'S
PRIDE

_A NOVEL_

BY STEPHEN VINCENT BENÊT

ILLUSTRATIONS BY HENRY RALEIGH COPYRIGHT, 1922

BY

HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY

_First printing, August 1922_ _TO ROSEMARY

If I were sly, I'd steal for you that cobbled hill, Montmartre,
Josephine's embroidered shoes, St. Louis' oriflamme,
The river on grey evenings and the bluebell-glass of Chartes,
And four sarcastic gargoyles from the roof of Notre Dame.

That wouldn't be enough, though, enough nor half a part;
There'd be shells because they're sorrowful, and pansies since
they're wise,
The smell of rain on lilac-bloom, less fragrant than your heart,
And that small blossom of your name, as steadfast as your
eyes.

Sapphires, pirates, sandalwood, porcelains, sonnets, pearls,
Sunsets gay as Joseph's coat and seas like milky jade,
Dancing at your birthday like a mermaid's dancing curls
--If my father'd only brought me up to half a decent trade!

Nothing I can give you--nothing but the rhymes--
Nothing but the empty speech, the idle words and few,
The mind made sick with irony you helped so many times,
The strengthless water of the soul your truthfulness kept true.

Take the little withered things and neither laugh nor cry
--Gifts to make a sick man glad he's going out like sand--
They and I are yours, you know, as long as there's an I.
Take them for the ages. Then they may not shame your
hand._

"... For there groweth in great abundance
in this land a small flower, much blown about
by winds, named 'Young People's Pride'..."

DYCER'S _Herbal_
YOUNG PEOPLES PRIDE



I

It is one of Johnny Chipman's parties at the Harlequin Club, and as usual
the people the other people have been asked to meet are late and as usual
Johnny is looking hesitatingly around at those already collected with the
nervous kindliness of an absent-minded menagerie-trainer who is trying to
make a happy family out of a wombat, a porcupine, and two small Scotch
terriers because they are all very nice and he likes them all and he can't
quite remember at the moment just where he got hold of any of them. This
evening he has been making an omelet of youngest. K. Ricky French, the
youngest Harvard playwright to learn the tricks of C43, a Boston exquisite,
impeccably correct from his club tie to the small gold animal on his
watch-chain, is almost coming to blows with Slade Wilson, the youngest San
Francisco cartoonist to be tempted East by a big paper and still so new to
New York that no matter where he tries to take the subway, he always finds
himself buried under Times Square, over a question as to whether La Perouse
or Foyot's has the best _hors-d'oeuvres_ in Paris.

The conflict is taking place across Johnny's knees, both of which are
being used for emphasis by the disputants till he is nearly mashed like a
sandwich-filling between two argumentative slices of bread, but he is quite
content. Peter Piper, the youngest rare-book collector in the country, who,
if left to himself, would have gravitated naturally toward French and
a devastating conversation in monosyllables on the pretty failings of
prominent débutantes, is gradually warming Clark Stovall, the youngest
star of the Provincetown Players out of a prickly silence, employed in
supercilious blinks at all the large pictures of celebrated Harlequins
by discreet, intelligent questions as to the probable future of Eugene
O'Neill.

Stovall has just about decided to throw Greenwich Village omniscience
overboard and admit privately to himself that people like Peter can be both
human and interesting even if they do live in the East Sixties instead of
Macdougal Alley when a page comes in discreetly for Johnny Chipman. Johnny
rises like an agitated blond robin who has just spied the very two worms he
was keeping room for to top off breakfast. "Well" he says to the world at
large. "They're only fifteen minutes late apiece this time."

He darts out into the hall and reappears in a moment, a worm on either
side. Both worms will fit in easily with the youthful assortment already
gathered--neither can be more than twenty-five.

Oliver Crowe is nearly six feet, vividly dark, a little stooping, dressed
like anybody else in the Yale Club from hair parted in the middle to low
heavyish brown shoes, though the punctured patterns on the latter are a
year or so out of date. There is very little that is remarkable about
his appearance except the round, rather large head that shows writer or
pugilist indifferently, brilliant eyes, black as black warm marble under
heavy tortoise-shell glasses and a mouth that is not weak in the least
but somehow burdened by a pressure upon it like a pressure of wings, the
pressure of that kind of dream which will not release the flesh it inhabits
always and agonizes often until it is given perfect body and so does not
release it until such flesh has ceased. At present he is not the
youngest anything, except, according to himself 'the youngest failure in
advertising,' but a book of nakedly youthful love-poetry, which in gloomy
moments he wishes had never been written, although the _San Francisco
Warbler_ called it as 'tensely vital as the Shropshire Lad,' brought him
several column reviews and very nearly forty dollars in cash at twenty-one
and since then many people of his own age and one or two editors have
considered him "worth watching."

Ted Billett is dark too, but it is a ruddy darkness with high clear color
of skin. He could pass anywhere as a College Senior and though his clothes
seem to have been put on anyhow with no regard for pressing or tailoring
they will always raise a doubt in the minds of the uninstructed as to
whether it is not the higher carelessness that has dictated them rather
than ordinary poverty--a doubt that, in many cases, has proved innocently
fortunate for Ted. His hands are a curious mixture of square executive
ability and imaginative sensitiveness and his surface manners have often
been described as 'too snotty' by delicate souls toward whom Ted
was entirely unconscious of having acted with anything but the most
disinterested politeness. On the other hand a certain even-tempered
recklessness and capacity for putting himself in the other fellow's place
made him one of the few popularly lenient officers to be obeyed with
discipline in his outfit during the war. As regards anything Arty or Crafty
his attitude is merely appreciative--he is finishing up his last year of
law at Columbia.

Johnny introduces Oliver and Ted to everybody but Peter--the three were
classmates--shepherds his flock with a few disarmingly personal insults to
prevent stiffness closing down again over the four that have already got to
talking at the arrival of the two newcomers, and marshals them out to the
terrace where they are to have dinner. Without seeming to try, he seats
them so that Ted, Peter and Oliver will not form an offensive-defensive
alliance against the three who are strangers to them by retailing New Haven
anecdotes to each other for the puzzlement of the rest and starts the ball
rolling with a neat provocative attack on romanticism in general and Cabell
in particular.




II

"Johnny's strong for realism, aren't you, Johnny?"

"Well, yes, Ted, I am. I think 'Main Street' and 'Three Soldiers' are
two of the best things that ever happened to America. You can say it's
propaganda--maybe it is, but at any rate it's real. Honestly, I've gotten
so tired, we all have, of all this stuff about the small Middle Western
Town being the backbone of the country--"

"Backbone? Last vertebra!"

"As for 'Main Street,' it's--"

"It's the hardest book to read through without fallin' asleep where you
sit, though, that I've struck since the time I had to repeat Geology."
Peter smiles. "But, there, Johnny, I guess I'm the bone-head part of the
readin' public--"

"That's why you're just the kind of person that ought to read books like
that, Peter. The reading public in general likes candy laxatives, I'll
admit--Old Nest stuff--but you--"

"'Nobody else will ever have to write the description of a small Middle
Western Town'" quotes Oliver, discontentedly. "Well, who ever wanted to
write the description of a small Middle Western Town?" and from Ricky
French, selecting his words like flowers for a _boutonniere_.

"The trouble with 'Main Street' is not that it isn't the truth but that it
isn't nearly the whole truth. Now Sherwood Anderson--"

"Tennyson. Who _was_ Tennyson? He died young."

"Well, if _that_ is Clara Stratton's idea of how to play a woman who did."

The two sentences seem to come from no one and arrive nowhere. They are
batted out of the conversation like toy balloons.

"Bunny Andrews sailed for Paris Thursday," says Ted Billett longingly. "Two
years at the Beaux Arts," and for an instant the splintering of lances
stops, like the hush in a tournament when the marshal throws down the
warder, at the shine of that single word.

"All the same, New York is the best place to be right now if you're going
to do anything big," says Johnny uncomfortably, too much as if he felt he
just had to believe in it, but the rest are silent, seeing the Seine wind
under its bridges, cool as satin, grey-blue with evening, or the sawdust of
a restaurant near the quais where one can eat Rabelaisiantly for six francs
with wine and talk about anything at all without having to pose or explain
or be defensive, or the chimneypots of La Cité branch-black against winter
sky that is pallor of crimson when the smell of roast chestnuts drifts idly
as a student along Boulevard St. Germain, or none of these, or all, but for
each one nostalgic aspect of the city where good Americans go when they die
and bad ones while they live--to Montmartre.

"New York _is_ twice as romantic, really," says Johnny firmly.

"If you can't get out of it," adds Oliver with a twisted grin.

Ted Billett turns to Ricky French as if each had no other friend in the
world.

"You were over, weren't you?" he says, a little diffidently, but his voice
is that of Rachel weeping for her children.

"Well, there was a little café on the Rue Bonaparte--I suppose you wouldn't
know--"




III

The party has adjourned to Stovall's dog-kennel-sized apartment on
West Eleventh Street with oranges and ice, Peter Piper having suddenly
remembered a little place he knows where what gin is to be bought is
neither diluted Croton water nor hell-fire. The long drinks gather
pleasantly on the table, are consumed by all but Johnny, gather again. The
talk grows more fluid, franker.

"Phil Sellaby?---oh, the great Phil's just had a child--I mean his wife
has, but Phil's been having a book all winter and it's hard not to get 'em
mixed up. Know the girl he married?"

"Ran Waldo had a necking acquaintance with her at one time or another, I
believe. But now she's turned serious, I hear--_tres serieuse--tres bonne
femme_--"

"I bet his book'll be a cuckoo, then. Trouble with women. Can't do any
art and be married if you're in love with your wife. Instink--instinct of
creation--same thing in both cases--use it one way, not enough left
for other--unless, of course, like Goethe, you--" "Rats! Look at
Rossetti--Browning---Augustus John--William Morris--"

_"Browning!_ Dear man, when the public knows the _truth_ about the
Brownings!"

Ricky French is getting a little drunk but it shows itself only in a desire
to make every sentence unearthly cogent with perfect words.

"Unhappy marriage--ver' good--stimula-shion," he says, carefully but
unsteadily, "other thing--tosh!"

Peter Piper jerks a thumb in Oliver's direction.

"Oh, beg pardon! Engaged, you told me? Beg pardon--sorry--very. Writes?"

"Uh-huh. Book of poetry three years ago. Novel now he's trying to sell."

"Oh, yes, yes, yes. Remember. 'Dancers' Holiday'--he wrote that? Good
stuff, damn good. Too bad. Feenee. Why will they get married?"

The conversation veers toward a mortuary discussion of love. Being young,
nearly all of them are anxious for, completely puzzled by and rather afraid
of it, all at the same time. They wish to draw up one logical code to
cover its every variation; they look at it, as it is at present with the
surprised displeasure of florists at a hollyhock that will come blue when
by every law of variation it should be rose. It is only a good deal later
that they will be able to give, not blasphemy because the rules of the game
are always mutually inconsistent, but tempered thanks that there are any
rules at all. Now Ricky French especially has the air of a demonstrating
anatomist over an anesthetized body. "Observe, gentlemen--the carotid
artery lies here. Now, inserting the scalpel at this point--"

"The trouble with Art is that it doesn't pay a decent living wage unless
you're willing to commercialize--"

"The trouble with Art is that it never did, except for a few chance lucky
people--"

"The trouble with Art is women."

"The trouble with women is Art."

"The trouble with Art--with women, I mean--change signals! What do I mean?"




IV

Oliver is taking Ted out to Melgrove with him over Sunday for suburban
fresh-air and swimming, so the two just manage to catch the 12.53 from the
Grand Central, in spite of Slade Wilson's invitation to talk all night and
breakfast at the Brevoort. They spend the rattling, tunnel-like passage to
125th Street catching their breath again, a breath that seems to strike
a florid gentlemen in a dirty collar ahead of them with an expression of
permanent, sorrowful hunger. Then Ted remarks reflectively,

"Nice gin."

"Uh-huh. Not floor varnish anyway like most of this prohibition stuff. What
think of the people?"

"Interesting but hardly conclusive. Liked the Wilson lad. Peter, of course,
and Johnny. The French person rather young Back Bay, don't you think?"

Oliver smiles. The two have been through Yale, some of the war and much of
the peace together, and the fact has inevitably developed a certain quality
of being able to talk to each other in shorthand.

"Well, Groton plus Harvard--it always gets a little inhuman especially
Senior year--but gin had a civilizing influence. Lucky devil!"

"Why?"

"Baker's newest discovery--yes, it does sound like a patent medicine. Don't
mean that, but he has a play on the road--sure-fire, Johnny says--Edward
Sheldon stuff--Romance--"

"The Young Harvard Romantic. An Essay Presented to the Faculty of Yale
University by Theodore Billett for the Degree of--"

"Heard anything about your novel, Oliver?"

"Going to see my pet Mammon of Unrighteousness about it in a couple of
weeks. Oh _Lord!_"

"Present--not voting."

"Don't be cheap, Ted. If I could only make some money."

"Everybody says that there is money in advertising," Ted quotes
maliciously. "Where _have_ I heard that before?"

_"That's_ what anybody says about anything till they try it. Well, there
is--but not in six months for a copy-writer at Vanamee and Co. Especially
when the said copy-writer has to have enough to marry on." "And will write
novels when he ought to be reading, 'How I Sold America on Ossified Oats'
like a good little boy. Young people are _so_ impatient."

"Well, good Lord, Ted, we've been engaged eight months already and we
aren't getting any furtherer--"

"Remember the copybooks, my son. The love of a pure, good woman and the
one-way pocket--that's what makes the millionaires. Besides, look at
Isaac."

"Well, I'm no Isaac. And Nancy isn't Rebekah, praises be! But it is
an--emotional strain. On both of us."

"Well, all you have to do is sell your serial rights. After that--pie."

"I know. The trouble is, I can see it so plain if everything happens
right--and then--well--"

Ted is not very consoling.

"People get funny ideas about each other when they aren't close by. Even
when they're in love," he says rather darkly; and then, for no apparent
reason, "Poor Billy. See it?"

Oliver has, unfortunately--the announcement that the engagement between
Miss Flavia Marston of Detroit and Mr. William Curting of New York has
been broken by mutual consent was an inconspicuous little paragraph in the
morning papers. "That was all--just funny ideas and being away. And then
this homebred talent came along," Ted muses.

"Well, you're the hell of a--"

Ted suddenly jerks into consciousness of what he has been saying.

"Sorry" he says, completely apologetic, "didn't mean a word I said, just
sorry for Billy, poor guy. 'Fraid it'll break him up pretty bad at first."
This seems to make matters rather worse and he changes the subject
abruptly. "How's Nancy?" he asks with what he hopes seems disconnected
indifference.

"Nancy? All right. Hates St. Louis, of course."

"Should think she might, this summer. Pretty hot there, isn't it?"

"Says it's like a wet furnace. And her family's bothering her some."

"Um, too bad."

"Oh, _I_ don't mind. But it's rotten for her. They don't see the point
exactly--don't know that I blame them. She could be in Paris, now--that
woman was ready to put up the money. My fault."

"Well, she seems to like things better the way they are--God knows why,
my antic friend! If it were _my_ question between you and a year studying
abroad! Not that you haven't your own subtle attractions, Ollie." Ted has
hoped to irritate Oliver into argument by the closing remark, but the
latter only accepts it with militant gloom.

"Yes, I've done her out of that, too," he says abysmally, "as well as
sticking her in St. Louis while I stay here and can't even drag down enough
money to support her--"

"Oh, Ollie, snap out of it! That's only being dramatic. You know darn well
you will darn soon. I'll be saying 'bless you, my children, increase and
multiply,' inside a month if your novel goes through."

"If! Oh well. Oh hell. I think I've wept on your shoulder long enough for
tonight, Ted. Tell me your end of it--things breaking all right?"

Ted's face sets into lines that seem curiously foreign and aged for the
smooth surface.

"Well--you know my trouble," he brings out at last with some difficulty.
"You ought to, anyhow--we've talked each other over too much when we
were both rather planko for you not to. I'm getting along, I think. The
work--_ca marche assez bien_. And the restlessness--can be stood. That's
about all there is to say."

Both are completely serious now.

"Bon. Very glad," says Oliver in a low voice.

"I can stand it. I was awful afraid I couldn't when I first got back. And
law interests me, really, though I've lost three years because of the war.
And I'm working like a pious little devil with a new assortment of damned
and when you haven't any money you can't go on parties in New York unless
you raise gravy riding to a fine art. Only sometimes--well, you know how it
is--"

Oliver nods.

"I'll be sitting there, at night especially, in that little tin Tophet of a
room on Madison Avenue, working. I _can_ work, if I do say it myself--I'm
hoping to get through with school in January, now. But it gets pretty
lonely, sometimes when there's nobody to run into that you can really talk
to--the people I used to play with in College are out of New York for the
summer--even Peter's down at Southampton most of the time or out at
Star Bay--you're in Melgrove--Sam Woodward's married and working in
Chicago--Brick Turner's in New Mexico--I've dropped out of the Wall Street
bunch in the class that hang out at the Yale Club--I'm posted there
anyhow, and besides they've all made money and I haven't, and all they want
to talk about is puts and calls. And then you remember things.

"The time my pilot and I blew into Paris when we thought we were hitting
somewhere around Nancy till we saw that blessed Eiffel Tower poking out
of the fog. And the Hotel de Turenne on Rue Vavin and getting up in the
morning and going out for a café cognac breakfast, and everything being
amiable and pleasant, and kidding along all the dear little ladies that sat
on the _terrasse_ when they dropped in to talk over last evening's affairs.
I suppose I'm a sensualist--"

"Everybody is." from Oliver.

"Well, that's another thing. Women. And love. Ollie, my son, you don't know
how very damn lucky you are!"

"I think I do, rather," says Oliver, a little stiffly.

"You don't. Because I'd give everything I have for what you've got and
all you can do is worry about whether you'll get married in six months or
eight."

"I'm worrying about whether I'll ever get married at all," from Oliver,
rebelliously.

"True enough, which is where I'm glowingly sympathetic for you, though you
may not notice it. But you're one of the few people I know--officers at
least--who came out of the war without stepping all through their American
home ideas of morality like a clown through a fake glass window. And
I'm--Freuded--if I see how or why you did."

"Don't myself--unless you call it pure accident" says Oliver, frankly.
"Well, that's it--women. Don't think I'm in love but the other thing pulls
pretty strong. And I want to get married all right, but what girls I know
and like best are in Peter's crowd and most of them own their own Rolls
Royces--and I won't be earning even a starvation wage for two, inside of
three or four years, I suppose. And as you can't get away from seeing and
talking to women unless you go and live in a cave--well, about once every
two weeks or oftener I'd like to chuck every lawbook I have out of the
window on the head of the nearest cop--go across again and get some sort of
a worthless job--I speak good enough French to do it if I wanted--and go to
hell like a gentleman without having to worry about it any longer. And I
won't do that because I'm through with it and the other thing is worth
while. So there you are."

"So you don't think you're in love--eh Monsieur Billett?" Oliver puts
irritatingly careful quotation marks around the verb. Ted twists a little.

"It all seems so blamed impossible," he says cryptically.

"Oh, I wouldn't call Elinor Piper _that_ exactly." Oliver grins. "Even if
she is Peter's sister. Old Peter. She's a nice girl."

"_A nice girl?_" Ted begins rather violently. "She's--why she's--" then
pauses, seeing the trap.

"Oh very well--that's all I wanted to know."

"Oh don't look so much like a little tin Talleyrand, Ollie! I'm _not_
sure--and that's rather more than I'd even hint to anybody else."

"Thanks, little darling." But Ted has been stung too suddenly, even by
Oliver's light touch on something which he thought was a complete and
mortuary secret, to be in a mood for sarcasm.

"Oh, well, you might as well know. I suppose you do."

"All I know is that you seem to have been visiting--Peter--a good deal this
summer."

"Well, it started with Peter."

"It does so often."

"Oh Lord, now I've _got_ to tell you. Not that there's
anything--definite--to tell." He pauses, looking at his hands.

"Well, I've just been telling you how I feel--sometimes. And other
times--being with Elinor--she's been so--kind. But I don't know, Ollie,
honestly I don't, and that's that."

"You see," he begins again, "the other thing--Oh, _Lord_, it's so tangled
up! But it's just this. It sounds--funny--probably--coming from me--and
after France and all that--but I'm not going to--pretend to myself I'm in
love with a girl--just because I may--want to get married--the way lots of
people do. I can't. And I couldn't with a girl like Elinor anyway--she's
too fine."

"She is rather fine," says Oliver appreciatively. "Selective reticence--all
that."

"Well, don't you see? And a couple of times--I've been nearly sure. And
then something comes and I'm not again--not the way I want to be. And
then--Oh, if I were, it wouldn't be much--use--you know--"

"Why not?"

"Well, consider our relative positions--"

"Consider your grandmother's cat! She's a girl--you're a man. She's a
lady--you're certainly a gentleman--though that sounds like Jane Austen.
And--"

"And she's--well, she isn't the wealthiest young lady in the country, but
the Pipers _are_ rich, though they never go and splurge around about it.
And I'm living on scholarships and borrowed money from the family--and even
after I really start working I probably won't make enough to live on for
two or three years at least. And you can't ask a girl like that--"

"Oh, Ted, this is the twentieth century! I'm not telling you to hang up
your hat and live on your wife's private income--" "That's fortunate," from
Ted, rather stubbornly and with a set jaw.

"But there's no reason on earth--if you both really loved each other and
wanted to get married--why you couldn't let her pay her share for the first
few years. You know darn well you're going to make money sometime--"

"Well--yes."

"Well, then. And Elinor's sporting. She isn't the kind that needs six
butlers to live--she doesn't live that way now. That's just pride, Ted,
thinking that--and a rather bum variety of pride when you come down to it.
I hate these people who moan around and won't be happy unless they can do
everything themselves--they're generally the kind that give their wives a
charge account at Lucile's and ten dollars a year pocket money and go into
blue fits whenever poor spouse runs fifty cents over her allowance."

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