This Side of Paradise
with one-half you’ve said. Government ownership is the basis of
your whole argument, and it’s invariably a beehive of corruption.
Men won’t work for blue ribbons, that’s all rot.”
When he ceased the little man spoke up with a determined nod, as
if resolved this time to have his say out.
“There are certain things which are human nature,” he asserted
with an owl-like look, “which always have been and always will
be, which can’t be changed.”
Amory looked from the small man to the big man helplessly.
“Listen to that! _That’s_ what makes me discouraged with
progress. _Listen_ to that! I can name offhand over one hundred
natural phenomena that have been changed by the will of man—a
hundred instincts in man that have been wiped out or are now held
in check by civilization. What this man here just said has been
for thousands of years the last refuge of the associated
mutton-heads of the world. It negates the efforts of every
scientist, statesman, moralist, reformer, doctor, and philosopher
that ever gave his life to humanity’s service. It’s a flat
impeachment of all that’s worth while in human nature. Every
person over twenty-five years old who makes that statement in
cold blood ought to be deprived of the franchise.”
The little man leaned back against the seat, his face purple with
rage. Amory continued, addressing his remarks to the big man.
“These quarter-educated, stale-minded men such as your friend
here, who _think_ they think, every question that comes up,
you’ll find his type in the usual ghastly muddle. One minute it’s
‘the brutality and inhumanity of these Prussians’—the next it’s
‘we ought to exterminate the whole German people.’ They always
believe that ‘things are in a bad way now,’ but they ‘haven’t any
faith in these idealists.’ One minute they call Wilson ‘just a
dreamer, not practical’—a year later they rail at him for making
his dreams realities. They haven’t clear logical ideas on one
single subject except a sturdy, stolid opposition to all change.
They don’t think uneducated people should be highly paid, but
they won’t see that if they don’t pay the uneducated people their
children are going to be uneducated too, and we’re going round
and round in a circle. That—is the great middle class!”
The big man with a broad grin on his face leaned over and smiled
at the little man.
“You’re catching it pretty heavy, Garvin; how do you feel?”
The little man made an attempt to smile and act as if the whole
matter were so ridiculous as to be beneath notice. But Amory was
not through.
“The theory that people are fit to govern themselves rests on
this man. If he can be educated to think clearly, concisely, and
logically, freed of his habit of taking refuge in platitudes and
prejudices and sentimentalisms, then I’m a militant Socialist. If
he can’t, then I don’t think it matters much what happens to man
or his systems, now or hereafter.”
“I am both interested and amused,” said the big man. “You are
very young.”
“Which may only mean that I have neither been corrupted nor made
timid by contemporary experience. I possess the most valuable
experience, the experience of the race, for in spite of going to
college I’ve managed to pick up a good education.”
“You talk glibly.”
“It’s not all rubbish,” cried Amory passionately. “This is the
first time in my life I’ve argued Socialism. It’s the only
panacea I know. I’m restless. My whole generation is restless.
I’m sick of a system where the richest man gets the most
beautiful girl if he wants her, where the artist without an
income has to sell his talents to a button manufacturer. Even if
I had no talents I’d not be content to work ten years, condemned
either to celibacy or a furtive indulgence, to give some man’s
son an automobile.”
“But, if you’re not sure—”
“That doesn’t matter,” exclaimed Amory. “My position couldn’t be
worse. A social revolution might land me on top. Of course I’m
selfish. It seems to me I’ve been a fish out of water in too many
outworn systems. I was probably one of the two dozen men in my
class at college who got a decent education; still they’d let any
well-tutored flathead play football and _I_ was ineligible,
because some silly old men thought we should _all_ profit by
conic sections. I loathed the army. I loathed business. I’m in
love with change and I’ve killed my conscience—”
“So you’ll go along crying that we must go faster.”
“That, at least, is true,” Amory insisted. “Reform won’t catch up
to the needs of civilization unless it’s made to. A laissez-faire
policy is like spoiling a child by saying he’ll turn out all
right in the end. He will—if he’s made to.”
“But you don’t believe all this Socialist patter you talk.”
“I don’t know. Until I talked to you I hadn’t thought seriously
about it. I wasn’t sure of half of what I said.”
“You puzzle me,” said the big man, “but you’re all alike. They
say Bernard Shaw, in spite of his doctrines, is the most exacting
of all dramatists about his royalties. To the last farthing.”
“Well,” said Amory, “I simply state that I’m a product of a
versatile mind in a restless generation—with every reason to
throw my mind and pen in with the radicals. Even if, deep in my
heart, I thought we were all blind atoms in a world as limited as
a stroke of a pendulum, I and my sort would struggle against
tradition; try, at least, to displace old cants with new ones.
I’ve thought I was right about life at various times, but faith
is difficult. One thing I know. If living isn’t a seeking for the
grail it may be a damned amusing game.”
For a minute neither spoke and then the big man asked:
“What was your university?”
“Princeton.”
The big man became suddenly interested; the expression of his
goggles altered slightly.
“I sent my son to Princeton.”
“Did you?”
“Perhaps you knew him. His name was Jesse Ferrenby. He was killed
last year in France.”
“I knew him very well. In fact, he was one of my particular
friends.”
“He was—a—quite a fine boy. We were very close.”
Amory began to perceive a resemblance between the father and the
dead son and he told himself that there had been all along a
sense of familiarity. Jesse Ferrenby, the man who in college had
borne off the crown that he had aspired to. It was all so far
away. What little boys they had been, working for blue ribbons—
The car slowed up at the entrance to a great estate, ringed
around by a huge hedge and a tall iron fence.
“Won’t you come in for lunch?”
Amory shook his head.
“Thank you, Mr. Ferrenby, but I’ve got to get on.”
The big man held out his hand. Amory saw that the fact that he
had known Jesse more than outweighed any disfavor he had created
by his opinions. What ghosts were people with which to work! Even
the little man insisted on shaking hands.
“Good-by!” shouted Mr. Ferrenby, as the car turned the corner and
started up the drive. “Good luck to you and bad luck to your
theories.”
“Same to you, sir,” cried Amory, smiling and waving his hand.
“OUT OF THE FIRE, OUT OF THE LITTLE ROOM”
Eight hours from Princeton Amory sat down by the Jersey roadside
and looked at the frost-bitten country. Nature as a rather coarse
phenomenon composed largely of flowers that, when closely
inspected, appeared moth-eaten, and of ants that endlessly
traversed blades of grass, was always disillusioning; nature
represented by skies and waters and far horizons was more
likable. Frost and the promise of winter thrilled him now, made
him think of a wild battle between St. Regis and Groton, ages
ago, seven years ago—and of an autumn day in France twelve months
before when he had lain in tall grass, his platoon flattened down
close around him, waiting to tap the shoulders of a Lewis gunner.
He saw the two pictures together with somewhat the same primitive
exaltation—two games he had played, differing in quality of
acerbity, linked in a way that differed them from Rosalind or the
subject of labyrinths which were, after all, the business of
life.
“I am selfish,” he thought.
“This is not a quality that will change when I ‘see human
suffering’ or ‘lose my parents’ or ‘help others.’
“This selfishness is not only part of me. It is the most living
part.
“It is by somehow transcending rather than by avoiding that
selfishness that I can bring poise and balance into my life.
“There is no virtue of unselfishness that I cannot use. I can
make sacrifices, be charitable, give to a friend, endure for a
friend, lay down my life for a friend—all because these things
may be the best possible expression of myself; yet I have not one
drop of the milk of human kindness.”
The problem of evil had solidified for Amory into the problem of
sex. He was beginning to identify evil with the strong phallic
worship in Brooke and the early Wells. Inseparably linked with
evil was beauty—beauty, still a constant rising tumult; soft in
Eleanor’s voice, in an old song at night, rioting deliriously
through life like superimposed waterfalls, half rhythm, half
darkness. Amory knew that every time he had reached toward it
longingly it had leered out at him with the grotesque face of
evil. Beauty of great art, beauty of all joy, most of all the
beauty of women.
After all, it had too many associations with license and
indulgence. Weak things were often beautiful, weak things were
never good. And in this new loneness of his that had been
selected for what greatness he might achieve, beauty must be
relative or, itself a harmony, it would make only a discord.
In a sense this gradual renunciation of beauty was the second
step after his disillusion had been made complete. He felt that
he was leaving behind him his chance of being a certain type of
artist. It seemed so much more important to be a certain sort of
man.
His mind turned a corner suddenly and he found himself thinking
of the Catholic Church. The idea was strong in him that there was
a certain intrinsic lack in those to whom orthodox religion was
necessary, and religion to Amory meant the Church of Rome. Quite
conceivably it was an empty ritual but it was seemingly the only
assimilative, traditionary bulwark against the decay of morals.
Until the great mobs could be educated into a moral sense some
one must cry: “Thou shalt not!” Yet any acceptance was, for the
present, impossible. He wanted time and the absence of ulterior
pressure. He wanted to keep the tree without ornaments, realize
fully the direction and momentum of this new start.
The afternoon waned from the purging good of three o’clock to the
golden beauty of four. Afterward he walked through the dull ache
of a setting sun when even the clouds seemed bleeding and at