Chapter 4: Narcissus Off Duty (2)

But Amory was not in a mood for that, and as he saw Burne’s long
legs propel his ridiculous bicycle out of sight beyond Alexander
Hall, he knew he was going to have a bad week. Not that he
doubted the war—Germany stood for everything repugnant to him;
for materialism and the direction of tremendous licentious force;
it was just that Burne’s face stayed in his memory and he was
sick of the hysteria he was beginning to hear.

“What on earth is the use of suddenly running down Goethe,” he
declared to Alec and Tom. “Why write books to prove he started
the war—or that that stupid, overestimated Schiller is a demon in
disguise?”

“Have you ever read anything of theirs?” asked Tom shrewdly.

“No,” Amory admitted.

“Neither have I,” he said laughing.

“People will shout,” said Alec quietly, “but Goethe’s on his same
old shelf in the library—to bore any one that wants to read him!”

Amory subsided, and the subject dropped.

“What are you going to do, Amory?”

“Infantry or aviation, I can’t make up my mind—I hate mechanics,
but then of course aviation’s the thing for me—”

“I feel as Amory does,” said Tom. “Infantry or aviation—aviation
sounds like the romantic side of the war, of course—like cavalry
used to be, you know; but like Amory I don’t know a horse-power
from a piston-rod.”

Somehow Amory’s dissatisfaction with his lack of enthusiasm
culminated in an attempt to put the blame for the whole war on
the ancestors of his generation... all the people who cheered for
Germany in 1870.... All the materialists rampant, all the
idolizers of German science and efficiency. So he sat one day in
an English lecture and heard “Locksley Hall” quoted and fell into
a brown study with contempt for Tennyson and all he stood for—for
he took him as a representative of the Victorians.

Victorians, Victorians, who never learned to weep Who sowed the
bitter harvest that your children go to reap—

scribbled Amory in his note-book. The lecturer was saying
something about Tennyson’s solidity and fifty heads were bent to
take notes. Amory turned over to a fresh page and began scrawling
again.

“They shuddered when they found what Mr. Darwin was about, They shuddered when the waltz came in and Newman hurried out—”

But the waltz came in much earlier; he crossed that out.

“And entitled A Song in the Time of Order,” came the professor’s
voice, droning far away. “Time of Order”—Good Lord! Everything
crammed in the box and the Victorians sitting on the lid smiling
serenely.... With Browning in his Italian villa crying bravely:
“All’s for the best.” Amory scribbled again.

“You knelt up in the temple and he bent to hear you pray, You thanked him for your ‘glorious gains’—reproached him for ‘Cathay.’”

Why could he never get more than a couplet at a time? Now he
needed something to rhyme with:

“You would keep Him straight with science, tho He had gone wrong before...”

Well, anyway....

“You met your children in your home—‘I’ve fixed it up!’ you cried, Took your fifty years of Europe, and then virtuously—died.”

“That was to a great extent Tennyson’s idea,” came the lecturer’s
voice. “Swinburne’s Song in the Time of Order might well have
been Tennyson’s title. He idealized order against chaos, against
waste.”

At last Amory had it. He turned over another page and scrawled
vigorously for the twenty minutes that was left of the hour. Then
he walked up to the desk and deposited a page torn out of his
note-book.

“Here’s a poem to the Victorians, sir,” he said coldly.

The professor picked it up curiously while Amory backed rapidly
through the door.

Here is what he had written:

“Songs in the time of order You left for us to sing, Proofs with
excluded middles, Answers to life in rhyme, Keys of the prison
warder And ancient bells to ring, Time was the end of riddles, We
were the end of time...
Here were domestic oceans And a sky that we might reach, Guns and a
guarded border, Gantlets—but not to fling, Thousands of old
emotions And a platitude for each, Songs in the time of order— And
tongues, that we might sing.”

THE END OF MANY THINGS

Early April slipped by in a haze—a haze of long evenings on the
club veranda with the graphophone playing “Poor Butterfly”
inside... for “Poor Butterfly” had been the song of that last
year. The war seemed scarcely to touch them and it might have
been one of the senior springs of the past, except for the
drilling every other afternoon, yet Amory realized poignantly
that this was the last spring under the old regime.

“This is the great protest against the superman,” said Amory.

“I suppose so,” Alec agreed.

“He’s absolutely irreconcilable with any Utopia. As long as he
occurs, there’s trouble and all the latent evil that makes a
crowd list and sway when he talks.”

“And of course all that he is is a gifted man without a moral
sense.”

“That’s all. I think the worst thing to contemplate is this—it’s
all happened before, how soon will it happen again? Fifty years
after Waterloo Napoleon was as much a hero to English school
children as Wellington. How do we know our grandchildren won’t
idolize Von Hindenburg the same way?”

“What brings it about?”

“Time, damn it, and the historian. If we could only learn to look
on evil as evil, whether it’s clothed in filth or monotony or
magnificence.”

“God! Haven’t we raked the universe over the coals for four
years?”

Then the night came that was to be the last. Tom and Amory, bound
in the morning for different training-camps, paced the shadowy
walks as usual and seemed still to see around them the faces of
the men they knew.

“The grass is full of ghosts to-night.”

“The whole campus is alive with them.”

They paused by Little and watched the moon rise, to make silver
of the slate roof of Dodd and blue the rustling trees.

“You know,” whispered Tom, “what we feel now is the sense of all
the gorgeous youth that has rioted through here in two hundred
years.”

A last burst of singing flooded up from Blair Arch—broken voices
for some long parting.

“And what we leave here is more than this class; it’s the whole
heritage of youth. We’re just one generation—we’re breaking all
the links that seemed to bind us here to top-booted and
high-stocked generations. We’ve walked arm and arm with Burr and
Light-Horse Harry Lee through half these deep-blue nights.”

“That’s what they are,” Tom tangented off, “deep blue—a bit of
color would spoil them, make them exotic. Spires, against a sky
that’s a promise of dawn, and blue light on the slate roofs—it
hurts... rather—”

“Good-by, Aaron Burr,” Amory called toward deserted Nassau Hall,
“you and I knew strange corners of life.”

His voice echoed in the stillness.

“The torches are out,” whispered Tom. “Ah, Messalina, the long
shadows are building minarets on the stadium—”

For an instant the voices of freshman year surged around them and
then they looked at each other with faint tears in their eyes.

“Damn!”

“Damn!”

The last light fades and drifts across the land—the low, long
land, the sunny land of spires; the ghosts of evening tune again
their lyres and wander singing in a plaintive band down the long
corridors of trees; pale fires echo the night from tower top to
tower: Oh, sleep that dreams, and dream that never tires, press
from the petals of the lotus flower something of this to keep,
the essence of an hour.

No more to wait the twilight of the moon in this sequestered vale
of star and spire, for one eternal morning of desire passes to
time and earthy afternoon. Here, Heraclitus, did you find in fire
and shifting things the prophecy you hurled down the dead years;
this midnight my desire will see, shadowed among the embers,
furled in flame, the splendor and the sadness of the world.

INTERLUDE

May, 1917-February, 1919

A letter dated January, 1918, written by Monsignor Darcy to
Amory, who is a second lieutenant in the 171st Infantry, Port of
Embarkation, Camp Mills, Long Island.

MY DEAR BOY:

All you need tell me of yourself is that you still are; for the
rest I merely search back in a restive memory, a thermometer that
records only fevers, and match you with what I was at your age.
But men will chatter and you and I will still shout our
futilities to each other across the stage until the last silly
curtain falls _plump!_ upon our bobbing heads. But you are
starting the spluttering magic-lantern show of life with much the
same array of slides as I had, so I need to write you if only to
shriek the colossal stupidity of people....

This is the end of one thing: for better or worse you will never
again be quite the Amory Blaine that I knew, never again will we
meet as we have met, because your generation is growing hard,
much harder than mine ever grew, nourished as they were on the
stuff of the nineties.

Amory, lately I reread Aeschylus and there in the divine irony of
the “Agamemnon” I find the only answer to this bitter age—all the
world tumbled about our ears, and the closest parallel ages back
in that hopeless resignation. There are times when I think of the
men out there as Roman legionaries, miles from their corrupt
city, stemming back the hordes... hordes a little more menacing,
after all, than the corrupt city... another blind blow at the
race, furies that we passed with ovations years ago, over whose
corpses we bleated triumphantly all through the Victorian era....

And afterward an out-and-out materialistic world—and the Catholic
Church. I wonder where you’ll fit in. Of one thing I’m
sure—Celtic you’ll live and Celtic you’ll die; so if you don’t
use heaven as a continual referendum for your ideas you’ll find
earth a continual recall to your ambitions.

Amory, I’ve discovered suddenly that I’m an old man. Like all old
men, I’ve had dreams sometimes and I’m going to tell you of them.
I’ve enjoyed imagining that you were my son, that perhaps when I
was young I went into a state of coma and begat you, and when I
came to, had no recollection of it... it’s the paternal instinct,
Amory—celibacy goes deeper than the flesh....

Sometimes I think that the explanation of our deep resemblance is
some common ancestor, and I find that the only blood that the
Darcys and the O’Haras have in common is that of the
O’Donahues... Stephen was his name, I think....

When the lightning strikes one of us it strikes both: you had
hardly arrived at the port of embarkation when I got my papers to
start for Rome, and I am waiting every moment to be told where to
take ship. Even before you get this letter I shall be on the
ocean; then will come your turn. You went to war as a gentleman
should, just as you went to school and college, because it was
the thing to do. It’s better to leave the blustering and
tremulo-heroism to the middle classes; they do it so much better.

Do you remember that week-end last March when you brought Burne
Holiday from Princeton to see me? What a magnificent boy he is!
It gave me a frightful shock afterward when you wrote that he
thought me splendid; how could he be so deceived? Splendid is the
one thing that neither you nor I are. We are many other
things—we’re extraordinary, we’re clever, we could be said, I
suppose, to be brilliant. We can attract people, we can make
atmosphere, we can almost lose our Celtic souls in Celtic
subtleties, we can almost always have our own way; but
splendid—rather not!

I am going to Rome with a wonderful dossier and letters of
introduction that cover every capital in Europe, and there will
be “no small stir” when I get there. How I wish you were with me!
This sounds like a rather cynical paragraph, not at all the sort
of thing that a middle-aged clergyman should write to a youth
about to depart for the war; the only excuse is that the
middle-aged clergyman is talking to himself. There are deep
things in us and you know what they are as well as I do. We have
great faith, though yours at present is uncrystallized; we have a
terrible honesty that all our sophistry cannot destroy and, above
all, a childlike simplicity that keeps us from ever being really
malicious.

I have written a keen for you which follows. I am sorry your
cheeks are not up to the description I have written of them, but
you _will_ smoke and read all night—

At any rate here it is:

A Lament for a Foster Son, and He going to the War Against the
King of Foreign.

“Ochone He is gone from me the son of my mind And he in his golden
youth like Angus Oge Angus of the bright birds And his mind strong and
subtle like the mind of Cuchulin on Muirtheme.
Awirra sthrue His brow is as white as the milk of the cows of Maeve
And his cheeks like the cherries of the tree And it bending down to
Mary and she feeding the Son of God.
Aveelia Vrone His hair is like the golden collar of the Kings at Tara
And his eyes like the four gray seas of Erin. And they swept with the
mists of rain.
Mavrone go Gudyo He to be in the joyful and red battle Amongst the
chieftains and they doing great deeds of valor His life to go from
him It is the chords of my own soul would be loosed.
A Vich Deelish My heart is in the heart of my son And my life is in
his life surely A man can be twice young In the life of his sons
only.
Jia du Vaha Alanav May the Son of God be above him and beneath him,
before him and behind him May the King of the elements cast a mist
over the eyes of the King of Foreign, May the Queen of the Graces
lead him by the hand the way he can go through the midst of his
enemies and they not seeing him
May Patrick of the Gael and Collumb of the Churches and the five
thousand Saints of Erin be better than a shield to him And he got
into the fight. Och Ochone.”

Amory—Amory—I feel, somehow, that this is all; one or both of us
is not going to last out this war.... I’ve been trying to tell
you how much this reincarnation of myself in you has meant in the
last few years... curiously alike we are... curiously unlike.
Good-by, dear boy, and God be with you. THAYER DARCY.

EMBARKING AT NIGHT

Amory moved forward on the deck until he found a stool under an
electric light. He searched in his pocket for note-book and
pencil and then began to write, slowly, laboriously:

“We leave to-night... Silent, we filled the still, deserted street, A
column of dim gray, And ghosts rose startled at the muffled beat Along
the moonless way; The shadowy shipyards echoed to the feet That turned
from night and day.
And so we linger on the windless decks, See on the spectre shore
Shades of a thousand days, poor gray-ribbed wrecks... Oh, shall we
then deplore Those futile years! See how the sea is white! The
clouds have broken and the heavens burn To hollow highways, paved
with gravelled light The churning of the waves about the stern
Rises to one voluminous nocturne, ... We leave to-night.”

A letter from Amory, headed “Brest, March 11th, 1919,” to
Lieutenant T. P. D’Invilliers, Camp Gordon, Ga.

DEAR BAUDELAIRE:—

We meet in Manhattan on the 30th of this very mo.; we then
proceed to take a very sporty apartment, you and I and Alec, who
is at me elbow as I write. I don’t know what I’m going to do but
I have a vague dream of going into politics. Why is it that the
pick of the young Englishmen from Oxford and Cambridge go into
politics and in the U. S. A. we leave it to the muckers?—raised
in the ward, educated in the assembly and sent to Congress,
fat-paunched bundles of corruption, devoid of “both ideas and
ideals” as the debaters used to say. Even forty years ago we had
good men in politics, but we, we are brought up to pile up a
million and “show what we are made of.” Sometimes I wish I’d been
an Englishman; American life is so damned dumb and stupid and
healthy.

Since poor Beatrice died I’ll probably have a little money, but
very darn little. I can forgive mother almost everything except
the fact that in a sudden burst of religiosity toward the end,
she left half of what remained to be spent in stained-glass
windows and seminary endowments. Mr. Barton, my lawyer, writes me
that my thousands are mostly in street railways and that the said
Street R.R. s are losing money because of the five-cent fares.
Imagine a salary list that gives $350 a month to a man that can’t
read and write!—yet I believe in it, even though I’ve seen what
was once a sizable fortune melt away between speculation,
extravagance, the democratic administration, and the income
tax—modern, that’s me all over, Mabel.

At any rate we’ll have really knock-out rooms—you can get a job
on some fashion magazine, and Alec can go into the Zinc Company
or whatever it is that his people own—he’s looking over my
shoulder and he says it’s a brass company, but I don’t think it
matters much, do you? There’s probably as much corruption in
zinc-made money as brass-made money. As for the well-known Amory,
he would write immortal literature if he were sure enough about
anything to risk telling any one else about it. There is no more
dangerous gift to posterity than a few cleverly turned
platitudes.

Tom, why don’t you become a Catholic? Of course to be a good one
you’d have to give up those violent intrigues you used to tell me
about, but you’d write better poetry if you were linked up to
tall golden candlesticks and long, even chants, and even if the
American priests are rather burgeois, as Beatrice used to say,
still you need only go to the sporty churches, and I’ll introduce
you to Monsignor Darcy who really is a wonder.

Kerry’s death was a blow, so was Jesse’s to a certain extent. And
I have a great curiosity to know what queer corner of the world
has swallowed Burne. Do you suppose he’s in prison under some
false name? I confess that the war instead of making me orthodox,
which is the correct reaction, has made me a passionate agnostic.
The Catholic Church has had its wings clipped so often lately
that its part was timidly negligible, and they haven’t any good
writers any more. I’m sick of Chesterton.

I’ve only discovered one soldier who passed through the
much-advertised spiritual crisis, like this fellow, Donald
Hankey, and the one I knew was already studying for the ministry,
so he was ripe for it. I honestly think that’s all pretty much
rot, though it seemed to give sentimental comfort to those at
home; and may make fathers and mothers appreciate their children.
This crisis-inspired religion is rather valueless and fleeting at
best. I think four men have discovered Paris to one that
discovered God.

But us—you and me and Alec—oh, we’ll get a Jap butler and dress
for dinner and have wine on the table and lead a contemplative,
emotionless life until we decide to use machine-guns with the
property owners—or throw bombs with the Bolshevik God! Tom, I
hope something happens. I’m restless as the devil and have a
horror of getting fat or falling in love and growing domestic.

The place at Lake Geneva is now for rent but when I land I’m
going West to see Mr. Barton and get some details. Write me care
of the Blackstone, Chicago.

S’ever, dear Boswell,
SAMUEL JOHNSON.