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 twilight he came to a graveyard. There was a dusky, dreamy smell of flowers and the ghost of a new moon in the sky and shadows everywhere. On an impulse he considered trying to open the door of a rusty iron vault built into the side of a hill; a vault washed clean and covered with late-blooming, weepy watery-blue flowers that might have grown from dead eyes, sticky to the touch with a sickening odor.
Amory wanted to feel “William