Young Peoples Pride | Page 2

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are a year or so out of date.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