He had a very rich, a very instant sense of humor, and this humor, with the high, choking laugh and the great, shaking belly, had given him among many students a reputation for hearty good nature. But more observant people would find out that this impression of hearty and whole-souled good nature was not wholly true. If Gerald’s antagonism and prejudice were aroused, he could still scream with his great fat whah-whah of choking laughter, but this time the laugh had something else in it, for the great belly that shook with such convulsive mirth was also soured with bile. It was a strange and curiously mixed and twisted personality, a character that had much that was good, much that was high and fine, much that was warm, affectionate, and even generous in it, but also much that was vindictive and unforgiving, prejudiced and sentimental. It was, in the end, a character that had too much of the feminine in it to be wholly masculine, and this perhaps was its essential defect.
Pine Rock—the small Baptist college of red brick, in its setiting of Catawba clay and pine—had released him. In this new and somewhat freer world, he had expanded rapidly. His quick mind and his ready wit, his great scream of belly laughter, and something comfortable about him that made him very easy company, also made him a considerable favorite. He came to college in the fall of 1914. Two years later, when Monk joined him there, he was a junior, and well-founded: the ruling member, as it were, of a coterie; the director of a clique; already priestly, paternal, and all-fatherly, the father-confessor to a group of younger boys, most of them freshmen, that he herded under his protective wing, who came to him, as just recently they must have come to mother’s knee, to pour out on his receiving breast the burden of their woe.
Jerry—for so he was called—loved confession. It was, and would remain, the greatest single stimulus of his life. And in a way, it was the perfect role for him: nature had framed him for the receiving part. He was always fond of saying afterward that it was not until his second year at college that he really “found” himself; strictly measured, that process of finding was almost wholly included in the process of being confessed to. He was like a kind of enormous, never sated, never saturated sponge. The more he got, the more he wanted. His whole manner, figure, personality, under the inner impulsion of this need, took on a kind of receptive urgency. By his twentieth year he was a master in the art of leading on. The broad brow, the jowled face, the fat hand holding a moist cigarette, the great head occasionally turned to take a long, luxurious drag, the eyes behind their polished frames of glass a little misty, the mouth imprinted faintly by a little smile that can only be described as tender, a little whimsical, as who should say, “Ah, life. Life. How bad and mad and sad it is, but then, ah, me, how sweet!”—it was all so irresistible that the freshmen simply ran bleating to the fold. There was nothing of which they did not unbosom themselves, and if, as often happened, they had nothing in particular to unbosom themselves of, they invented something. In this process of spiritual evacuation, it is to be feared the temptations of carnal vice came first.
It was, in fact, simply astounding how many of Jerry’s freshmen had been sorely tempted by beautiful but depraved women—if the siren was mysterious and unknown, all the better. In one variant of the story, the innocent had been on his way to college, and had stopped over for the night at a hotel in a neighboring town. On his way to his room, a door along the corridor was opened: before him stood a beautiful specimen of the female sex, without a stitch of clothing on, inviting him with sweet smiles and honeyed words into her nest of silken skin. For a moment the freshman was shaken, his senses reeled, all that he had learned, all he had been taught to respect and keep holy, whirled around him in a dizzy rout: before he realized what he was doing, he found himself inside the accursed den of wickedness, half-fainting in the embraces of this modern whore of Babylon.
And then—then—he saw the image of his mother’s face, or the features of the pure, sweet girl for whom he was “keeping himself.” The freshmen of Pine Rock were usually in a careful state of refrigeration—nearly all of them were “keeping themselves” for a whole regiment of pure, sweet girls, to whose virginity they would someday add the accolade of their own penil sanctification. At any rate, during Jerry’s regime at Pine Rock the number of lovely but depraved females who were cruising around through the hotel corridors of the state in a condition of original sin and utter nakedness was really astonishing. The census figures for this type of temptation were never before, or after, so high.