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 regime.
"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
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