INTERLUDE
May, 1917-February, 1919
A letter dated January, 1918, written by Monsignor Darcy to Amory, whois 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 Imerely search back in a restive memory, a thermometer that records onlyfevers, and match you with what I was at your age. But men will chatterand you and I will still shout our futilities to each other acrossthe stage until the last silly curtain falls _plump!_ upon our bobbingheads. But you are starting the spluttering magic-lantern show of lifewith much the same array of slides as I had, so I need to write you ifonly to shriek the colossal stupidity of people....
This is the end of one thing: for better or worse you will never againbe quite the Amory Blaine that I knew, never again will we meet as wehave met, because your generation is growing hard, much harder than mineever grew, nourished as they were on the stuff of the nineties.
Amory, lately I reread Aeschylus and there in the divine irony of theAgamemnon I find the only answer to this bitter age--all the worldtumbled about our ears, and the closest parallel ages back in thathopeless resignation. There are times when I think of the men out thereas Roman legionaries, miles from their corrupt city, stemming back thehordes... hordes a little more menacing, after all, than the corruptcity... another blind blow at the race, furies that we passed withovations years ago, over whose corpses we bleated triumphantly allthrough the Victorian era....
And afterward an out-and-out materialistic world--and the CatholicChurch. I wonder where you'll fit in. Of one thing I'm sure--Celticyou'll live and Celtic you'll die; so if you don't use heaven as acontinual referendum for your ideas you'll find earth a continual recallto your ambitions.
Amory, I've discovered suddenly that I'm an old man. Like all oldmen, I've had dreams sometimes and I'm going to tell you of them. I'veenjoyed imagining that you were my son, that perhaps when I was youngI went into a state of coma and begat you, and when I came to, had norecollection of it... it's the paternal instinct, Amory--celibacy goesdeeper than the flesh....
Sometimes I think that the explanation of our deep resemblance is somecommon ancestor, and I find that the only blood that the Darcys andthe O'Haras have in common is that of the O'Donahues... Stephen was hisname, I think....
When the lightning strikes one of us it strikes both: you had hardlyarrived at the port of embarkation when I got my papers to start forRome, and I am waiting every moment to be told where to take ship. Evenbefore you get this letter I shall be on the ocean; then will come yourturn. You went to war as a gentleman should, just as you went to schooland college, because it was the thing to do. It's better to leave theblustering and tremulo-heroism to the middle classes; they do it so muchbetter.
Do you remember that week-end last March when you brought Burne Holidayfrom Princeton to see me? What a magnificent boy he is! It gave me afrightful shock afterward when you wrote that he thought me splendid;how could he be so deceived? Splendid is the one thing that neither younor I are. We are many other things--we're extraordinary, we're clever,we could be said, I suppose, to be brilliant. We can attract people,we can make atmosphere, we can almost lose our Celtic souls in Celticsubtleties, we can almost always have our own way; but splendid--rathernot!
I am going to Rome with a wonderful dossier and letters of introductionthat cover every capital in Europe, and there will be no small stirwhen I get there. How I wish you were with me! This sounds like a rathercynical paragraph, not at all the sort of thing that a middle-agedclergyman should write to a youth about to depart for the war; the onlyexcuse is that the middle-aged clergyman is talking to himself. Thereare deep things in us and you know what they are as well as I do. Wehave great faith, though yours at present is uncrystallized; we have aterrible honesty that all our sophistry cannot destroy and, above all, achildlike simplicity that keeps us from ever being really malicious.
I have written a keen for you which follows. I am sorry your cheeks arenot up to the description I have written of them, but you _will_ smokeand read all night--
At any rate here it is:
A Lament for a Foster Son, and He going to the War Against the King ofForeign.
Ochone He is gone from me the son of my mind And he in his golden youth like Angus Oge Angus of the bright birds And his mind strong and subtle like the mind of Cuchulin on Muirtheme.
Awirra sthrue His brow is as white as the milk of the cows of Maeve And his cheeks like the cherries of the tree And it bending down to Mary and she feeding the Son of God.
Aveelia Vrone His hair is like the golden collar of the Kings at Tara And his eyes like the four gray seas of Erin. And they swept with the mists of rain.
Mavrone go Gudyo He to be in the joyful and red battle Amongst the chieftains and they doing great deeds of valor His life to go from him It is the chords of my own soul would be loosed.
A Vich Deelish My heart is in the heart of my son And my life is in his life surely A man can be twice young In the life of his sons only.
Jia du Vaha Alanav May the Son of God be above him and beneath him, before him and behind him May the King of the elements cast a mist over the eyes of the King of Foreign, May the Queen of the Graces lead him by the hand the way he can go through the midst of his enemies and they not seeing him
May Patrick of the Gael and Collumb of the Churches and the five thousand Saints of Erin be better than a shield to him And he got into the fight. Och Ochone.
Amory--Amory--I feel, somehow, that this is all; one or both of us isnot going to last out this war.... I've been trying to tell you how muchthis reincarnation of myself in you has meant in the last few years...curiously alike we are... curiously unlike. Good-by, dear boy, and Godbe with you. THAYER DARCY.
*****
EMBARKING AT NIGHT
Amory moved forward on the deck until he found a stool under an electriclight. He searched in his pocket for note-book and pencil and then beganto write, slowly, laboriously:
We leave to-night... Silent, we filled the still, deserted street, A column of dim gray, And ghosts rose startled at the muffled beat Along the moonless way; The shadowy shipyards echoed to the feet That turned from night and day.
And so we linger on the windless decks, See on the spectre shore Shades of a thousand days, poor gray-ribbed wrecks... Oh, shall we then deplore Those futile years! See how the sea is white! The clouds have broken and the heavens burn To hollow highways, paved with gravelled light The churning of the waves about the stern Rises to one voluminous nocturne, ... We leave to-night.
A letter from Amory, headed Brest, March 11th, 1919, to Lieutenant T.P. D'Invilliers, Camp Gordon, Ga.
DEAR BAUDELAIRE:--
We meet in Manhattan on the 30th of this very mo.; we then proceed totake a very sporty apartment, you and I and Alec, who is at me elbow asI write. I don't know what I'm going to do but I have a vague dream ofgoing into politics. Why is it that the pick of the young Englishmenfrom Oxford and Cambridge go into politics and in the U. S. A. we leaveit to the muckers?--raised in the ward, educated in the assembly andsent to Congress, fat-paunched bundles of corruption, devoid of bothideas and ideals as the debaters used to say. Even forty years ago wehad good men in politics, but we, we are brought up to pile up a millionand show what we are made of. Sometimes I wish I'd been an Englishman;American life is so damned dumb and stupid and healthy.
Since poor Beatrice died I'll probably have a little money, but verydarn little. I can forgive mother almost everything except the fact thatin a sudden burst of religiosity toward the end, she left half of whatremained to be spent in stained-glass windows and seminary endowments.Mr. Barton, my lawyer, writes me that my thousands are mostly in streetrailways and that the said Street R.R. s are losing money because of thefive-cent fares. Imagine a salary list that gives $350 a month to a manthat can't read and write!--yet I believe in it, even though I'veseen what was once a sizable fortune melt away between speculation,extravagance, the democratic administration, and the income tax--modern,that's me all over, Mabel.
At any rate we'll have really knock-out rooms--you can get a job on somefashion magazine, and Alec can go into the Zinc Company or whatever itis that his people own--he's looking over my shoulder and he says it'sa brass company, but I don't think it matters much, do you? There'sprobably as much corruption in zinc-made money as brass-made money. Asfor the well-known Amory, he would write immortal literature if he weresure enough about anything to risk telling any one else about it.There is no more dangerous gift to posterity than a few cleverly turnedplatitudes.
Tom, why don't you become a Catholic? Of course to be a good one you'dhave to give up those violent intrigues you used to tell me about,but you'd write better poetry if you were linked up to tall goldencandlesticks and long, even chants, and even if the American priests arerather burgeois, as Beatrice used to say, still you need only go to thesporty churches, and I'll introduce you to Monsignor Darcy who really isa wonder.
Kerry's death was a blow, so was Jesse's to a certain extent. And I havea great curiosity to know what queer corner of the world has swallowedBurne. Do you suppose he's in prison under some false name? I confessthat the war instead of making me orthodox, which is the correctreaction, has made me a passionate agnostic. The Catholic Church has hadits wings clipped so often lately that its part was timidly negligible,and they haven't any good writers any more. I'm sick of Chesterton.
I've only discovered one soldier who passed through the much-advertisedspiritual crisis, like this fellow, Donald Hankey, and the one I knewwas already studying for the ministry, so he was ripe for it. I honestlythink that's all pretty much rot, though it seemed to give sentimentalcomfort to those at home; and may make fathers and mothers appreciatetheir children. This crisis-inspired religion is rather valueless andfleeting at best. I think four men have discovered Paris to one thatdiscovered God.
But us--you and me and Alec--oh, we'll get a Jap butler and dress fordinner and have wine on the table and lead a contemplative, emotionlesslife until we decide to use machine-guns with the property owners--orthrow bombs with the Bolshevik God! Tom, I hope something happens. I'mrestless as the devil and have a horror of getting fat or falling inlove and growing domestic.
The place at Lake Geneva is now for rent but when I land I'm going Westto see Mr. Barton and get some details. Write me care of the Blackstone,Chicago.
S'ever, dear Boswell,
SAMUEL JOHNSON.