of course I am not. Do you think I’d come just to see you and Charlie—
Helen—(Gently) Good-night, John.
She closes the window. Outside a clock strikes nine. The clatter of a few people on the stairway comes muffled through the door. She turns on the lights and, going up to the glass, looks long and with an intense interest at herself. A powder puff comes into use for an instant. An errant wisp of hair is tucked into position, and a necklace from somewhere slides into place.
Mrs. Halycon—(Outside) Oh, Helen!
Helen—Coming, Mother.
She opens the top bureau drawer, takes out a silver cigarette case, and a miniature silver flask, and places them in a side drawer of the writing desk. Then she turns out all the lights and opens the door. The tuning of violins comes in nervous twangs and discord up the stairs. She turns once more and stands by the window. From below, there is a sudden burst of sound, as the orchestra swings into “Poor Butterfly.” The violins and faint drums and a confused chord from a piano, the rich odor of powder and new silk, a blend of laughters all surge together into the room. She dances toward the mirror, kisses the vague reflection of her face, and runs out the door.
Silence for a moment. Bundled figures pass along the hall, silhouetted against the lighted door. The laughter heard from below becomes doubled and multiplied. Suddenly a moving blur takes shape behind the bureau. It resolves itself into a human figure, which arises, tip-toes over and shuts the door. It crosses the room, and the lights go on again. Cecilia looks about her and, with the light of definite purpose in her rich green eyes, goes to the desk drawer, takes out the minature flask and the cigarette case. She lights a cigarette and, puffing and coughing, walks to the pier-glass.
Cecilia—(Addressing her future self) Oh, yes! Really, coming out is such a farce nowadays, y’know. We really play around so much before we are seventeen, that it’s positive anticlimax. (Shaking hands with a visionary middle-aged man of the world) Yes, I b’lieve I’ve heard m’ sister speak of you. Have a puff. They’re very good. They’re Coronas. You don’t smoke? What a pity.
She crosses to the desk and picks up the flask. From downstairs the rain of clapping between encores rises. She raises the flask, uncorks it, smells it, tastes a little, and then drinks about the equivalent of two cocktails. She replaces the flask, makes a wry face and, as the music starts again, fox-trots slowly around the room, waving the cigarette with intense seriousness, and watching herself in the long mirror.
Curtain
— ◆ —
The Spire and the Gargoyle.
Nassau Literary Magazine (February 1917)
I.
The night mist fell. From beyond the moon it rolled, clustered about the spires and towers, and then settled below them so that the dreaming peaks seemed still in lofty aspiration toward the stars. Figures that dotted the daytime like ants now brushed along as ghosts in and out of the night. Even the buildings seemed infinitely more mysterious as they loomed suddenly out of the darkness, outlined each by a hundred faint squares of yellow light. Indefinitely from somewhere a bell boomed the quarter hour and one of the squares of light in an east campus recitation hall was blotted out for an instant as a figure emerged. It paused and resolved itself into a boy who stretched his arms wearily and, advancing, threw himself down full length on the damp grass by the sun-dial. The cool bathed his eyes and helped to force away the tiresome picture of what he had just left, a picture that, in the two strenuous weeks of examinations now just over, had become indelibly impressed upon his memory—a room with the air fairly vibrating with nervous tension, silent with the presence of twenty boys working desperately against time, searching every corner of tired brains for words and figures which seemed forever lost. The boy out on the grass opened his eyes and looked back at the three pale blurs which marked the windows of the examination room. Again he heard:
“There will be fifteen minutes more allowed for this examination.” There had followed silence broken by the snapping of verifying watches and the sharp frantic race of pencils. One by one the seats had been left vacant and the little preceptor with the tired look had piled the booklets higher. Then the boy had left the room to the music of three last scratching pencils.
In his case it all depended on this examination. If he passed it he would become a sophomore the following fall; if he failed, it meant that his college days faded out with the last splendors of June. Fifty cut recitations in his first wild term had made necessary the extra course of which he had just taken the examination. Winter muses, unacademic and cloistered by 42nd Street and Broadway, had stolen hours from the dreary stretches of February and March. Later, time had crept insidiously through the lazy April afternoons and seemed so intangible in the long spring twilights. So June found him unprepared. Evening after evening the senior singing, drifting over the campus and up to his window, drew his mind for an instant to the unconscious poetry of it and he, goading on his spoiled and over-indulged faculties, bent to the revengeful books again. Through the careless shell that covered his undergraduate consciousness had broken a deep and almost reverent liking for the grey walls and Gothic peaks and all they symbolized in the store of the ages of antiquity.
In view of his window a tower sprang upward, grew into a spire, yearning higher till its uppermost end was half invisible against the morning skies. The transiency and relative unimportance of the campus figures except as holders of a sort of apostolic succession had first impressed themselves on him in contrast with this spire. In a lecture or in an article or in conversation, he had learned that Gothic architecture with its upward trend was peculiarly adapted to colleges, and the symbolism of this idea had become personal to him. Once he had associated the beauty of the campus night with the parades and singing crowds that streamed through it, but in the last month the more silent stretches of sward and the quiet halls with an occasional late-burning scholastic light held his imagination with a stronger grasp—and this tower in full view of his window became the symbol of his perception. There was something terribly pure in the slope of the chaste stone, something which led and directed and called. To him the spire became an ideal. He had suddenly begun trying desperately to stay in college.
“Well, it’s over,” he whispered aloud to himself, wetting his hands in the damp and running them through his hair. “All over.”
He felt an enormous sense of relief. The last pledge had been duly indited in the last book, and his destiny lay no longer in his own hands, but in those of the little preceptor, whoever he was: the boy had never seen him before—and the face,—he looked like one of the gargoyles that nested in dozens of niches in some of the buildings. His glasses, his eyes, or his mouth gave a certain grotesque upward slant to his whole cast of feature that branded him as of gargoyle origin, or at least gargoyle kinship. He was probably marking the papers. Perhaps, mused the boy, a bit of an interview, an arrangement for a rereading in case of the ever possible failure would be—to interrupt his thought the light went out in the examination room and a moment later three figures edged along the path beside him while a fourth struck off south toward the town. The boy jumped to his feet and, shaking himself like a wet spaniel, started after the preceptor. The man turned to him sharply as he murmured a good evening and started trudging along beside.
“Awful night,” said the boy.
The gargoyle only grunted.
“Gosh, that was a terrible examination.” This topic died as unfruitfully as that of the weather, so he decided to come directly to the point.
“Are you marking these papers, sir?”
The preceptor stopped and faced him. Perhaps he didn’t want to be reminded of the papers, perhaps he was in the habit of being exasperated by anything of this sort, but most probably he was tired and damp and wanted to get home.
“This isn’t doing you any good. I know what you’re going to say—that this is the crucial examination for you and that you’d