CHAPTER I
THE SUN ALSO RISE
CHAPTER I
Robert Cohn was once middleweight boxing champion of princeton. Do not think that I am very much impressed by that as a boxsing tittle, but it meant a lot to Cohn. He cared nothing for boxing, in fact he dislike it, but he learned it painfully and thoroughly to counteract the feeling of inferiority and shyness he had felt on being treated as a Jew at Princaton.There was a cer tain inner commfort in knowing he could knock down anybody who was snooty to him, although, being very shy and a thoroughly nice boy, he never fought except in gym He was Spider kelly's star pupil Spider kelly taught all his young gentlemen to box like featherweights, no matter whether they weighed one hundred and five or two hundred and five pounds. But it seemed to fit Cohn. He was really very fast. he was so goood that sepider promptly overmatched him and got his nose permanently flattened. This increased Chhn's distaste for boxing, but it gave him a certain satisfaction of some strange sort, and it certainly improved his nose. In his last year at princeton he read too much and took to wearing spectacles. I never met any of his class who remembered him. They did not remebered that be was middle weight boxing champion.
I mistrust all frank and simple people, especially when their stories hold together, and I always had a suspition that perhaps Robert Cohn had never been middleweight boxing champion, and that mother had been frightened or seen someting, or that he had maybe, bumped into something, or that he had somebody verify the story from Spider Kelly. Sepider Kelly not only remembered Cohn. He had often wondered what had become of him.
Robert Cohn was member, through his father, of one of the richest Jewisth famllies in New York, and through his mother of one of the oldest. At the military school where he prepped for princecton, and played a very goog end on the football team, no one had made him race-conscious. No one had ever made him feel he was a Jew, and hence any different from anybody else, until he went to princeton. He was a nice boy, a friendly boy, and very shy, and it made him bitter. He took it out in boxing, and he came out of princeton with painful self-consciousness and the flatterned nose, and was married by the the first girl who was nice to him.
He wa married five year, had three children, lost most of the fifty thousand dollars his father left him, the balance of the estate having gone to hi mother, hardened into a rather unattracrive mould under domestik unhappines with a rich wife, and just when he had made up his mind to leave his wife she left him and went off with a miniature painter. As her departure was a very healthful shok.
The divorce was arranged and Robert Chon went out to the coast. In California he fell among literary people and, as he still had a little of the fifty thousand left, in a short time he was backing a review of the Arts. The review commenced publication in Carmel, California, and finished in provincetown, Massachusetts by the time Cohn, tho had been ragarded purely as an angel and whose name had appared on the editorial pge marely as a member of the advisory board, had become the sole editor. It was his money and he discovered he like the authority of editing. he was sorry when the magazine became too expensive and had to give it up.