---

Скачать книгу

---

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 régime.

      “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

---

Скачать книгу