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Then he walked up to the desk and deposited a page torn out of his notebook.

      “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 tonight.”

      “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

       Table of Contents

      May, 1917-February, 1919

       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…

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