Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald (Illustrated) (20 page)

“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, CampMills, 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....