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 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.