INTERLUDE
May, 1917-February, 1919
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| A letter dated January, 1918, written by Monsignor Darcy to
Amory, who is a second lieutenant in the 171st Infantry, Port of
Embarkation, Camp Mills, Long Island.
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| MY DEAR BOY:
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| All you need tell me of yourself is that you still are; for the
rest I merely search back in a restive memory, a thermometer that
records only fevers, and match you with what I was at your age.
But men will chatter and you and I will still shout our
futilities to each other across the stage until the last silly
curtain falls plump! upon our bobbing heads. But you are starting
the spluttering magic-lantern show of life with much the same
array of slides as I had, so I need to write you if only to
shriek the colossal stupidity of people....
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| This is the end of one thing: for better or worse you will never
again be quite the Amory Blaine that I knew, never again will we
meet as we have met, because your generation is growing hard,
much harder than mine ever grew, nourished as they were on the
stuff of the nineties.
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| Amory, lately I reread Fschylus and there in the divine irony of
the "Agamemnon" I find the only answer to this bitter ageall the
world tumbled about our ears, and the closest parallel ages back
in that hopeless resignation. There are times when I think of the
men out there as Roman legionaries, miles from their corrupt
city, stemming back the hordes ... hordes a little more menacing,
after all, than the corrupt city ... another blind blow at the
race, furies that we passed with ovations years ago, over whose
corpses we bleated triumphantly all through the Victorian era....
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| And afterward an out-and-out materialistic worldand the Catholic
Church. I wonder where you'll fit in. Of one thing I'm sureCeltic
you'll live and Celtic you'll die; so if you don't use heaven as
a continual referendum for your ideas you'll find earth a
continual recall to your ambitions.
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| Amory, I've discovered suddenly that I'm an old man. Like all old
men, I've had dreams sometimes and I'm going to tell you of them.
I've enjoyed imagining that you were my son, that perhaps when I
was young I went into a state of coma and begat you, and when I
came to, had no recollection of it ... it's the paternal
instinct, Amory-celibacy goes deeper than the flesh....
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| Sometimes I think that the explanation of our deep resemblance is
some common ancestor, and I find that the only blood that the
Darcys and the O'Haras have in common is that of the O'Donahues
... Stephen was his name, I think....
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| When the lightning strikes one of us it strikes both: you had
hardly arrived at the port of embarkation when I got my papers to
start for Rome, and I am waiting every moment to be told where to
take ship. Even before you get this letter I shall be on the
ocean; then will come your turn. You went to war as a gentleman
should, just as you went to school and college, because it was
the thing to do. It's better to leave the blustering and
tremulo-heroism to the middle classes; they do it so much better.
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| Do you remember that week-end last March when you brought Burne
Holiday from Princeton to see me? What a magnificent boy he is!
It gave me a frightful shock afterward when you wrote that he
thought me splendid; how could he be so deceived? Splendid is the
one thing that neither you nor I are. We are many other
thingswe'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 Celtic
subtleties, we can almost always have our own way; but
splendidrather not!
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| I am going to Rome with a wonderful dossier and letters of
introduction that cover every capital in Europe, and there will
be "no small stir" when I get there. How I wish you were with me!
This sounds like a rather cynical paragraph, not at all the sort
of thing that a middle-aged clergyman should write to a youth
about to depart for the war; the only excuse is that the
middle-aged clergyman is talking to himself. There are deep
things in us and you know what they are as well as I do. We have
great faith, though yours at present is uncrystallized; we have a
terrible honesty that all our sophistry cannot destroy and, above
all, a childlike simplicity that keeps us from ever being really
malicious.
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| I have written a keen for you which follows. I am sorry your
cheeks are not up to the description I have written of them, but
you will smoke and read all night
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| At any rate here it is:
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| A Lament for a Foster Son, and He going to the War Against the
King of Foreign.
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"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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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 go into the fight.
Och Ochone."
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Amory-AmoryI feel, somehow, that this is all; one or both of us
is not going to last out this war.... I've been trying to tell
you how much this reincarnation of myself in you has meant in the
last few years ... curiously alike we are ... curiously unlike.
Good-by, dear boy, and God be with you.
THAYER DARCY.
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| EMBARKING AT NIGHT
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| Amory moved forward on the deck until he found a stool under an
electric light. He searched in his pocket for note-book and
pencil and then began to write, slowly, laboriously:
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| "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.
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| 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."
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| A letter from Amory, headed "Brest, March 11th, 1919," to
Lieutenant T. P. D'Invilliers, Camp Gordon, Ga.
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| DEAR BAUDELAIRE:
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| We meet in Manhattan on the 30th of this very mo.; we then
proceed to take a very sporty apartment, you and I and Alec, who
is at me elbow as I write. I don't know what I'm going to do but
I have a vague dream of going into politics. Why is it that the
pick of the young Englishmen from Oxford and Cambridge go into
politics and in the U. S. A. we leave it to the muckers?raised in
the ward, educated in the assembly and sent to Congress,
fat-paunched bundles of corruption, devoid of "both ideas and
ideals" as the debaters used to say. Even forty years ago we had
good men in politics, but we, we are brought up to pile up a
million and "show what we are made of." Sometimes I wish I'd been
an Englishman; American life is so damned dumb and stupid and
healthy.
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| Since poor Beatrice died I'll probably have a little money, but
very darn little. I can forgive mother almost everything except
the fact that in a sudden burst of religiosity toward the end,
she left half of what remained to be spent in stained-glass
windows and seminary endowments. Mr. Barton, my lawyer, writes me
that my thousands are mostly in street railways and that the said
Street R.R.s are losing money because of the five-cent fares.
Imagine a salary list that gives $350 a month to a man that can't
read and write!yet I believe in it, even though I've seen what
was once a sizable fortune melt away between speculation,
extravagance, the democratic administration, and the income
taxmodern, that's me all over, Mabel.
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| At any rate we'll have really knock-out roomsyou can get a job on
some fashion magazine, and Alec can go into the Zinc Company or
whatever it is that his people ownhe's looking over my shoulder
and he says it's a brass company, but I don't think it matters
much, do you? There's probably as much corruption in zinc-made
money as brass-made money. As for the well-known Amory, he would
write immortal literature if he were sure enough about anything
to risk telling any one else about it. There is no more dangerous
gift to posterity than a few cleverly turned platitudes.
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| Tom, why don't you become a Catholic? Of course to be a good one
you'd have 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 golden candlesticks and long, even chants, and even if the
American priests are rather burgeois, as Beatrice used to say,
still you need only go to the sporty churches, and I'll introduce
you to Monsignor Darcy who really is a wonder.
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| Kerry's death was a blow, so was Jesse's to a certain extent. And
I have a great curiosity to know what queer corner of the world
has swallowed Burne. Do you suppose he's in prison under some
false name? I confess that the war instead of making me orthodox,
which is the correct reaction, has made me a passionate agnostic.
The Catholic Church has had its 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.
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| I've only discovered one soldier who passed through the
much-advertised spiritual crisis, like this fellow, Donald
Hankey, and the one I knew was already studying for the ministry,
so he was ripe for it. I honestly think that's all pretty much
rot, though it seemed to give sentimental comfort to those at
home; and may make fathers and mothers appreciate their children.
This crisis-inspired religion is rather valueless and fleeting at
best. I think four men have discovered Paris to one that
discovered God.
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| But usyou and me and Alecoh, we'll get a Jap butler and dress for
dinner and have wine on the table and lead a contemplative,
emotionless life until we decide to use machine-guns with the
property ownersor throw bombs with the Bolshevik God! Tom, I hope
something happens. I'm restless as the devil and have a horror of
getting fat or falling in love and growing domestic.
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| The place at Lake Geneva is now for rent but when I land I'm
going West to see Mr. Barton and get some details. Write me care
of the Blackstone, Chicago.
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| S'ever, dear Boswell,
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| SAMUEL JOHNSON.
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