CHAPTER 2. Spires and Gargoyles 9 page

talk, but Clara, if I come back in two years in a position to marry

you--"

She shook her head.

"No," she said; "I'd never marry again. I've got my two children and I

want myself for them. I like you--I like all clever men, you more than

any--but you know me well enough to know that I'd never marry a clever

man--" She broke off suddenly.

"Amory."

"What?"

"You're not in love with me. You never wanted to marry me, did you?"

"It was the twilight," he said wonderingly. "I didn't feel as though I

were speaking aloud. But I love you--or adore you--or worship you--"

"There you go--running through your catalogue of emotions in five

seconds."

He smiled unwillingly.

"Don't make me out such a light-weight, Clara; you _are_ depressing

sometimes."

"You're not a light-weight, of all things," she said intently, taking

his arm and opening wide her eyes--he could see their kindliness in the

fading dusk. "A light-weight is an eternal nay."

"There's so much spring in the air--there's so much lazy sweetness in

your heart."

She dropped his arm.

"You're all fine now, and I feel glorious. Give me a cigarette. You've

never seen me smoke, have you? Well, I do, about once a month."

And then that wonderful girl and Amory raced to the corner like two mad

children gone wild with pale-blue twilight.

"I'm going to the country for to-morrow," she announced, as she stood

panting, safe beyond the flare of the corner lamp-post. "These days are

too magnificent to miss, though perhaps I feel them more in the city."

"Oh, Clara!" Amory said; "what a devil you could have been if the Lord

had just bent your soul a little the other way!"

"Maybe," she answered; "but I think not. I'm never really wild and never

have been. That little outburst was pure spring."

"And you are, too," said he.

They were walking along now.

"No--you're wrong again, how can a person of your own self-reputed

brains be so constantly wrong about me? I'm the opposite of everything

spring ever stood for. It's unfortunate, if I happen to look like what

pleased some soppy old Greek sculptor, but I assure you that if it

weren't for my face I'd be a quiet nun in the convent without"--then

she broke into a run and her raised voice floated back to him as he

followed--"my precious babies, which I must go back and see."

She was the only girl he ever knew with whom he could understand how

another man might be preferred. Often Amory met wives whom he had known

as debutantes, and looking intently at them imagined that he found

something in their faces which said:

"Oh, if I could only have gotten _you!_" Oh, the enormous conceit of the

man!

But that night seemed a night of stars and singing and Clara's bright

soul still gleamed on the ways they had trod.

"Golden, golden is the air--" he chanted to the little pools of water.

... "Golden is the air, golden notes from golden mandolins, golden

frets of golden violins, fair, oh, wearily fair.... Skeins from braided

basket, mortals may not hold; oh, what young extravagant God, who would

know or ask it?... who could give such gold..."

*****

AMORY IS RESENTFUL

Slowly and inevitably, yet with a sudden surge at the last, while Amory

talked and dreamed, war rolled swiftly up the beach and washed the sands

where Princeton played. Every night the gymnasium echoed as platoon

after platoon swept over the floor and shuffled out the basket-ball

markings. When Amory went to Washington the next week-end he caught some

of the spirit of crisis which changed to repulsion in the Pullman car

coming back, for the berths across from him were occupied by stinking

aliens--Greeks, he guessed, or Russians. He thought how much easier

patriotism had been to a homogeneous race, how much easier it would have

been to fight as the Colonies fought, or as the Confederacy fought. And

he did no sleeping that night, but listened to the aliens guffaw and

snore while they filled the car with the heavy scent of latest America.

In Princeton every one bantered in public and told themselves privately

that their deaths at least would be heroic. The literary students read

Rupert Brooke passionately; the lounge-lizards worried over whether the

government would permit the English-cut uniform for officers; a few of

the hopelessly lazy wrote to the obscure branches of the War Department,

seeking an easy commission and a soft berth.

Then, after a week, Amory saw Burne and knew at once that argument would

be futile--Burne had come out as a pacifist. The socialist magazines,

a great smattering of Tolstoi, and his own intense longing for a cause

that would bring out whatever strength lay in him, had finally decided

him to preach peace as a subjective ideal.

"When the German army entered Belgium," he began, "if the inhabitants

had gone peaceably about their business, the German army would have been

disorganized in--"

"I know," Amory interrupted, "I've heard it all. But I'm not going to

talk propaganda with you. There's a chance that you're right--but even

so we're hundreds of years before the time when non-resistance can touch

us as a reality."

"But, Amory, listen--"

"Burne, we'd just argue--"

"Very well."

"Just one thing--I don't ask you to think of your family or friends,

because I know they don't count a picayune with you beside your sense

of duty--but, Burne, how do you know that the magazines you read and

the societies you join and these idealists you meet aren't just plain

_German?_"

"Some of them are, of course."

"How do you know they aren't _all_ pro-German--just a lot of weak

ones--with German-Jewish names."

"That's the chance, of course," he said slowly. "How much or how little

I'm taking this stand because of propaganda I've heard, I don't know;

naturally I think that it's my most innermost conviction--it seems a

path spread before me just now."

Amory's heart sank.

"But think of the cheapness of it--no one's really going to martyr you

for being a pacifist--it's just going to throw you in with the worst--"

"I doubt it," he interrupted.

"Well, it all smells of Bohemian New York to me."

"I know what you mean, and that's why I'm not sure I'll agitate."

"You're one man, Burne--going to talk to people who won't listen--with

all God's given you."

"That's what Stephen must have thought many years ago. But he preached

his sermon and they killed him. He probably thought as he was dying what

a waste it all was. But you see, I've always felt that Stephen's death

was the thing that occurred to Paul on the road to Damascus, and sent

him to preach the word of Christ all over the world."

"Go on."

"That's all--this is my particular duty. Even if right now I'm just a

pawn--just sacrificed. God! Amory--you don't think I like the Germans!"

"Well, I can't say anything else--I get to the end of all the logic

about non-resistance, and there, like an excluded middle, stands the

huge spectre of man as he is and always will be. And this spectre stands

right beside the one logical necessity of Tolstoi's, and the other

logical necessity of Nietzsche's--" Amory broke off suddenly. "When are

you going?"

"I'm going next week."

"I'll see you, of course."

As he walked away it seemed to Amory that the look in his face bore

a great resemblance to that in Kerry's when he had said good-by under

Blair Arch two years before. Amory wondered unhappily why he could never

go into anything with the primal honesty of those two.

"Burne's a fanatic," he said to Tom, "and he's dead wrong and, I'm

inclined to think, just an unconscious pawn in the hands of anarchistic

publishers and German-paid rag wavers--but he haunts me--just leaving

everything worth while--"

Burne left in a quietly dramatic manner a week later. He sold all his

possessions and came down to the room to say good-by, with a battered

old bicycle, on which he intended to ride to his home in Pennsylvania.

"Peter the Hermit bidding farewell to Cardinal Richelieu," suggested

Alec, who was lounging in the window-seat as Burne and Amory shook

hands.

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

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