I want to leave this place right away. You can stay for the lunch, if that’s what you want to do. But I’m going to hire a carriage and take the next train to Boston. Suit yourself, what you want to do. But George is coming with me. I asked him if he would, and he wants to. Stay if you want to, but you’ll only be making a spectacle of yourself if you do. And I know this much about people, Abraham Lockwood. Your friends won’t think any the more of you if you let your wife and son leave and you stay. For my part, I don’t care if you stay for good. I only know you’re a fool.
SEVEN
THE reader will do well to remind himself that the Lockwood Concern existed throughout the better part of a hundred years without ever being given a name. It was for that reason that George Bingham Lockwood always had difficulty in establishing the point at which his awareness of the Concern began. At first vaguely and then clearly he saw that his father had plans for him, that there was some sort of governing theme to his father’s direction of his life; but where other boys were being influenced and urged and ordered to study this for the law, that for medicine, to train certain muscles for use in certain games, to cultivate alliances with some contemporaries but not others, George Bingham Lockwood could find in his father’s counsel only the recurring wish that George—and the younger brother Penrose—would always remember that home was Swedish Haven, Swedish Haven was home. Repetition of this wish, expressed in various forms, eventually resulted in George’s recognition of Swedish Haven residence as his father’s rather modest hope for his family’s future, and this was not difficult to understand, since at St. Bartholomew’s nearly every boy accepted—or was already rebelling against— the eventual return to some place; a city, a town, an estate, a plantation, from which he had come, and which was more than the middle-class idea of home. The place, whether it was a populous one or an isolated establishment in the country, had implications of family continuity and prestige, and even those boys who were already rebelling against returning showed by their rebelliousness an awareness of the formidable opposition they must encounter. This was as true of the city boys—New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore—as of those who were listed in the school roster as coming from Prides Crossing, Massachusetts; Towson, Maryland; Purchase, New York. The city boys invariably referred to some rural postoffice or estate name in a tone that was more meaningful than the manner in which they spoke of their town residences. It was never strange to them that George Lockwood should come from a place called Swedish Haven; the names of their own places were just as strange. (The boys from Chicago and Buffalo had a worse time of it in that respect; the Chicago boy was nicknamed Chicago, and the Buffalo boy, Buffalo— both nouns being considered sufficiently disparaging for prep school nicknames.)
His father’s one wish seemed moderate enough and happened to conform with George’s own intentions as of his final years at St. Bartholomew’s and the beginning of his career at Princeton. He was still young enough to want very much to be home at Christmas; to visit his grandfather in Richterville, to collect the presents from his Richterville relatives, to go to the young people’s dance in Gibbsville (his social stock in Gibbsville had jumped immediately upon his admittance to St. Bartholomew’s, to which no Gibbsville parent had ever applied in behalf of a son), to eat the rich, heavy Pennsylvania Dutch sweetmeats, to go on sleighing parties for chicken-and-waffle suppers. The Philadelphia parties were fun, but less fun than the festivities closer to home. The Philadelphia parties were fun because George Lockwood knew that girls liked him; the Lantenengo County parties were fun because girls liked him and he did not have to be so careful about being too attentive to them; in Gibbsville everyone, without exception, knew who he was. The knowledge did not make for universal cordiality; some of the boys and some of their fathers were hostile or indifferent; but they knew who he was, and though he was young, he was old enough to like being recognized.
Life in Swedish Haven was pleasant quite apart from the festive occasions. At St. Bartholomew’s the boys and their parents were discouraged by Arthur Francis Ferris from all ostentation. George Lockwood and everyone else could name the boys whose families actually owned ocean-going yachts and racing stables, but there were other boys whose families could afford yachts and great stables and chose not to. Consequently, in among the inconspicuous non-spenders who possessed great wealth were mixed the sons of those who could not be called wealthy. There was so much wealth at St. Bartholomew’s that it was not fashionable, and any display of it was considered gauche. It was hardly a democratic school in its attitude toward candidates for admittance; social prestige, which was usually accompanied by more than adequate means, was the first requirement for entrance, and a George Lockwood never could have got in the school without the support of Morris Homestead and Harry Penn Downs, who vouched for Abraham Lockwood as an acceptable if not quite accepted man. No Jew, even of the Sephardic aristocracy, and no Roman Catholic, even of Maryland or Louisiana line, was admitted to the school during the Nineteenth Century. No native of the vast area between Charleston and New Orleans was able to satisfy Arthur Francis Ferris’s social standards, nor would he let in any son of a brewer (distillers’ sons were acceptable if they belonged to the landed gentry), a meat packer, a Baptist, a dentist, an Italian, a South American, or a grand opera singer male or female. A clergy-man who wore gaiters had a better chance of getting his son into St. Bartholomew’s than a minister of the gospel who wore a business suit, and a surgeon’s son had a better chance than the boy whose father was a pill-doctor. The president of a country bank got his son on the St. Bartholomew’s list a full generation ahead of the cashier of a large city bank. (None of this deterred Jews, Catholics, Alabamans, brewers, meat packers, Baptists, dentists, Italians, South Americans, tenors, Presbyterians, general practitioners or bank cashiers from trying to have exceptions made.) Nevertheless, Arthur Francis Ferris, having assembled a student body of the elite, thereupon made a conscientious effort to treat them all alike. He was a despot, but one who insisted on democratic practice among the boys. They dressed alike in a non-military uniform that was similar to the Etonians’; they made their own beds and washed out of tin basins; they formed ranks to march from classroom to classroom. Ferris’s strictness in regard to the possession of cash made money illegal tender, and the richest boy in school at any given moment was the one who had earned the most privileges, which consisted of intangibles such as a boy’s being allowed to study in his room instead of going to study-hall; leaving his light on after nine-thirty. Sometimes that boy had been George Lockwood, although he had never been elected Head Boy of his class or of the school, and the democratizing process had left him eagerly receptive toward the admiration, friendliness, obsequiousness, and adulation that awaited him in Swedish Haven, Richterville, and Gibbsville. The growing conviction that he was brighter, cleverer than his school-mates, and the sense of his attractiveness to girls and older women, had together created an egotism that needed that which St. Bartholomew’s had denied and which on his home ground was freely given. In such a state of mind he entered the freshman class at Princeton, already committed to one condition of the Lockwood Concern. He would never live anywhere but Swedish Haven.