Читать книгу The Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald - F. Scott Fitzgerald - Страница 68

Slowly and inevitably, yet with a sudden surge at the last, while Amory talked and dreamed, war rolled swiftly up the beach and washed the sands where Princeton played. Every night the gymnasium echoed as platoon after platoon swept over the floor and shuffled out the basket-ball markings. When Amory went to Washington the next week-end he caught some of the spirit of crisis which changed to repulsion in the Pullman car coming back, for the berths across from him were occupied by stinking aliens—Greeks, he guessed, or Russians. He thought how much easier patriotism had been to a homogeneous race, how much easier it would have been to fight as the Colonies fought, or as the Confederacy fought. And he did no sleeping that night, but listened to the aliens guffaw and snore while they filled the car with the heavy scent of latest America.

In Princeton every one bantered in public and told themselves privately that their deaths at least would be heroic. The literary students read Rupert Brooke passionately; the lounge-lizards worried over whether the government would permit the English-cut uniform for officers; a few of the hopelessly lazy wrote to the obscure branches of the War Department, seeking an easy commission and a soft berth.

Then, after a week, Amory saw Burne and knew at once that argument would be futile—Burne had come out as a pacifist. The socialist magazines, a great smattering of Tolstoi, and his own intense longing for a cause that would bring out whatever strength lay in him, had finally decided him to preach peace as a subjective ideal.

“When the German army entered Belgium,” he began, “if the inhabitants had gone peaceably about their business, the German army would have been disorganized in——”

“I know,” Amory interrupted, “I’ve heard it all. But I’m not going to talk propaganda with you. There’s a chance that you’re right—but even so we’re hundreds of years before the time when non-resistance can touch us as a reality.”

“But, Amory, listen——”

“Burne, we’d just argue——”

“Very well.”

“Just one thing—I don’t ask you to think of your family or friends, because I know they don’t count a picayune with you beside your sense of duty—but, Burne, how do you know that the magazines you read and the societies you join and these idealists you meet aren’t just plain German?”

“Some of them are, of course.”

“How do you know they aren’t all pro-German—just a lot of weak ones—with German-Jewish names.”

“That’s the chance, of course,” he said slowly. “How much or how little I’m taking this stand because of propaganda I’ve heard, I don’t know; naturally I think that it’s my most innermost conviction—it seems a path spread before me just now.”

Amory’s heart sank.

“But think of the cheapness of it—no one’s really going to martyr you for being a pacifist—it’s just going to throw you in with the worst——”

“I doubt it,” he interrupted.

“Well, it all smells of Bohemian New York to me.”

“I know what you mean, and that’s why I’m not sure I’ll agitate.”

“You’re one man, Burne—going to talk to people who won’t listen—with all God’s given you.”

“That’s what Stephen must have thought many years ago. But he preached his sermon and they killed him. He probably thought as he was dying what a waste it all was. But you see, I’ve always felt that Stephen’s death was the thing that occurred to Paul on the road to Damascus, and sent him to preach the word of Christ all over the world.”

“Go on.”

“That’s all—this is my particular duty. Even if right now I’m just a pawn—just sacrificed. God! Amory—you don’t think I like the Germans!”

“Well, I can’t say anything else—I get to the end of all the logic about non-resistance, 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.”