“And you are, too,” said he.
They were walking along now.
“No—you’re wrong again, how can a person of your own self-reputed brains be so constantly wrong about me? I’m the opposite of everything spring ever stood for. It’s unfortunate, if I happen to look like what pleased some soppy old Greek sculptor, but I assure you that if it weren’t for my face I’d be a quiet nun in the convent without”—then she broke into a run and her raised voice floated back to him as he followed—“my precious babies, which I must go back and see.”
She was the only girl he ever knew with whom he could understand how another man might be preferred. Often Amory met wives whom he had known as débutantes, and looking intently at them imagined that he found something in their faces which said:
“Oh, if I could only have gotten you!” Oh, the enormous conceit of the man!
But that night seemed a night of stars and singing and Clara’s bright soul still gleamed on the ways they had trod.
“Golden, golden is the air—” he chanted to the little pools of water…. “Golden is the air, golden notes from golden mandolins, golden frets of golden violins, fair, oh, wearily fair…. Skeins from braided basket, mortals may not hold; oh, what young extravagant God, who would know or ask it? … who could give such gold …”
Amory is Resentful.
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!”