This Side of Paradise
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