At Princeton the slightly spurious democracy of St. Bartholomew’s vanished immediately. Only one other boy—”Chicago”—had come down from St. Bartholomew’s to Princeton; all their classmates had gone to Harvard, Yale, and—the Philadelphians—to Penn. But there were eight St. Bartholomew’s boys in the sophomore, junior, and senior classes, and they had taken their proper place in the Princeton social hierarchy, thus easing the way for G. B. Lockwood and Anson “Chicago” Chatsworth. The formidable front presented by boys from Lawrenceville and The Hill made for a defensive unity among St. Bartholomew’s boys that was not necessarily the case at Harvard or Yale. Old boys from St. Bartholomew’s who had not been especially fond of Lockwood or Chatsworth in prep school now called on them and made a point of being seen publicly with them. These old boys had already made friends among the few graduates of Groton and St. Paul’s at Princeton, and Lockwood and Chatsworth were tentatively absorbed into this smallish group. This cabal bypassed the boys from the New Jersey and Pennsylvania high schools and the lesser prep schools, and since their existence as an informal homogeneous unit always contained the threat of formal organization, they were always able to get themselves elected to one or two of the more fashionable eating-clubs. A club composed of their own number would automatically have become as prestigious as any in the university, with an inevitable loss of some prestige for the clubs already in being.
In his first week at Princeton George Bingham Lockwood discarded the notions of democracy that had been superimposed at St. Bartholomew’s. It was ridiculously easy summarily to dismiss one-third of the freshman class on account of their clothes; but by the same token it was easy to be deceived by elegance: there were freshmen who dressed well whose good taste in clothes would never be enough to overcome handicaps that were not so readily apparent. In his first few days George Lockwood became friendly with a well-dressed classmate about whom he knew nothing except that he came from New York, obviously had money, and in spite of his blue eyes was of French extraction. The classmate’s name was Edmund Auberne. It came as a jolting surprise to learn that the man’s name was O’Byrne, that he was an Irish Catholic and a graduate of Fordham Prep. George Lockwood never had heard or seen the name O’Byrne, never had heard of Fordham Prep, and felt slightly tricked that he had not immediately recognized an Irish Catholic. As he saw more of O’Byrne and heard his quite deadly comments on undergraduates and faculty George Lockwood recovered his confidence in his judgments; if he could have heard the Irish name at the start of their friendship he would have known that such sardonic humor did not belong in the makeup of the kind of man O’Byrne had seemed to be. O’Byrne was sophisticated, witty, disrespectful, and apparently friendless. A second jolting surprise came with the early discovery that O’Byrne had an older brother who was a guard on the football team. (Football was not then played at St. Bartholomew’s, and George Lockwood had never seen an intercollegiate game.) O’Byrne therefore was not quite so lonesome as George Lockwood had guessed him to be. O’Byrne, in fact, constantly upset George Lockwood’s notions of him; he was an entirely new experience for George Lockwood, whose personal knowledge of the American Irish was limited to the laboring men who lived in Irishtown, on the mud flats of Swedish Haven, and to a few others who worked around horses as coachmen and hostlers. O’Byrne’s father was a Dublin-educated doctor, presumably a successful one. Edmund, or Ned, had been abroad twice, and he spoke of Bourke Cockran, Chauncey Olcott and Agnes Repplier as visitors to the O’Byrne house in New York in an impressed way that prevented George Lockwood from confessing that he had never heard of them. Ned O’Byrne’s whole attitude toward Princeton and the social system irritated George Lockwood, who did not believe his friend was in any position to be critical of a system that would automatically reject him. But when O’Byrne mentioned one day that his father was on a special train, touring the West with one of the Vanderbilts, George Lockwood once again was confused by this fellow who would not stay in a pigeonhole. O’Byrne was also a good card-player, who quite frankly expected to supplement his allowance while at Princeton with his winnings from the undergraduate body. (In the first semester of freshman year O’Byrne won more than five hundred dollars from Anson Chatsworth alone. “We must do everything we can to help him pass his examinations,” O’Byrne told George Lockwood. “You help him with his math and I’ll help him with his Latin. That chap is going to make up for my old man’s stinginess, these next three years.”)
George Lockwood was prepared to terminate his friendship with O’Byrne whenever it was expedient to do so, but he found that as he began to know the class as individuals and not merely as a group of young men with only the common tie of a hope to graduate in 1895, he would seek out the company of O’Byrne and two others. Those three were his choice, and finally O’Byrne was his choice of the three for two apparently contradictory reasons: he could relax with O’Byrne, and O’Byrne stimulated him. The other two of the three were Ezra Davenport and Jack Harbord.
Davenport was having a second try at freshman year, having flunked out on his first try, with the distinction of having failed his examinations in every subject. His indignant parents, unable to expend their wrath on Princeton University, put Davenport in a cramming school from February to August, and he was readmitted to college as a freshman. At nineteen he already had the look of a voluptuary, and he would grow into the look as time went on. He was a cigarette-fiend and affected the habit of speaking with a cigarette stuck on his lower lip, which bounced up and down as he spoke. He was constantly pushing back his forelocks, which constantly fell over his forehead. He cocked his head at an angle, to keep the cigarette smoke out of his eyes, and this habit made him appear to be attentive to conversations in a worldly-wise way. It took George Lockwood the better part of four years to realize that Ezra Davenport had attached himself to him, that Ezra had a weak stomach for alcoholic beverages and that his conquests of the female sex were largely, although not entirely, imaginary. Merely by flunking out of college in his first freshman year Ezra Davenport had established himself among the hellers of the campus, and his prematurely dissolute appearance gave credibility to the role he had assumed. He was actually a meek little fellow, an only son of two good-sized fortunes, who was unequal to the demands put upon him by his father and mother. In other circumstances he might have become a hotel clerk or an ineffectual member of the clergy, but he too was a victim of a Concern.
Jack Harbord was as correct as Ezra Davenport was wrong. It was hard to believe that anyone could become so upright in the first nineteen years of his life, a little harder to believe than that Davenport had become so worldly in the same time. Harbord was a rich boy, well dressed, gentlemanly manners and all, but in his case the accouterments of wealth and upbringing were reassuring; Jack Harbord would never use his money or his personality for sinister purpose. He was a tall blond with a magnificent physique, and he was elected class president without opposition, almost entirely on a fixed smile and a seemingly inexhaustible willingness to be helpful and good. “A very good man, Harbord,” said O’Byrne. “All good. No evil at all, not a bit. Doesn’t need an ass-hole like you and me. I understand he was born with his second teeth all in place. A good, good man, our Jack.”
“But that’s what he is. Why are you sarcastic about him? You prefer him to Davenport, don’t you?”
“He’s not as trustworthy.”
“As Davenport? You’re crazy in the head.”