I loathed the army.
I loathed business.
I’m in love with change and I’ve killed my conscience—”
“So you’ll go along crying that we must go faster.”
“That, at least, is true,” Amory insisted. “Reform won’t catch up to the needs of civilization unless it’s made to.
A laissez-faire policy is like spoiling a child by saying he’ll turn out all right in the end.
He will—if he’s made to.”
“But you don’t believe all this Socialist patter you talk.”
“I don’t know.
Until I talked to you I hadn’t thought seriously about it.
I wasn’t sure of half of what I said.”
“You puzzle me,” said the big man, “but you’re all alike.
They say Bernard Shaw, in spite of his doctrines, is the most exacting of all dramatists about his royalties.
To the last farthing.”
“Well,” said Amory, “I simply state that I’m a product of a versatile mind in a restless generation—with every reason to throw my mind and pen in with the radicals.
Even if, deep in my heart, I thought we were all blind atoms in a world as limited as a stroke of a pendulum, I and my sort would struggle against tradition; try, at least, to displace old cants with new ones.
I’ve thought I was right about life at various times, but faith is difficult.
One thing I know.
If living isn’t a seeking for the grail it may be a damned amusing game.”
For a minute neither spoke and then the big man asked:
“What was your university?”
“Princeton.”
The big man became suddenly interested; the expression of his goggles altered slightly.
“I sent my son to Princeton.”
“Did you?”
“Perhaps you knew him.
His name was Jesse Ferrenby.
He was killed last year in France.”
“I knew him very well.
In fact, he was one of my particular friends.”
“He was—a—quite a fine boy.
We were very close.”
Amory began to perceive a resemblance between the father and the dead son and he told himself that there had been all along a sense of familiarity.
Jesse Ferrenby, the man who in college had borne off the crown that he had aspired to.
It was all so far away.
What little boys they had been, working for blue ribbons—
The car slowed up at the entrance to a great estate, ringed around by a huge hedge and a tall iron fence.
“Won’t you come in for lunch?” Amory shook his head.
“Thank you, Mr. Ferrenby, but I’ve got to get on.”
The big man held out his hand.
Amory saw that the fact that he had known Jesse more than outweighed any disfavor he had created by his opinions.
What ghosts were people with which to work!
Even the little man insisted on shaking hands.
“Good-by!” shouted Mr. Ferrenby, as the car turned the corner and started up the drive. “Good luck to you and bad luck to your theories.”
“Same to you, sir,” cried Amory, smiling and waving his hand.
“Out of the Fire, Out of the Little Room”
Eight hours from Princeton Amory sat down by the Jersey roadside and looked at the frost-bitten country.
Nature as a rather coarse phenomenon composed largely of flowers that, when closely inspected, appeared moth-eaten, and of ants that endlessly traversed blades of grass, was always disillusioning; nature represented by skies and waters and far horizons was more likable.
Frost and the promise of winter thrilled him now, made him think of a wild battle between St. Regis and Groton, ages ago, seven years ago—and of an autumn day in France twelve months before when he had lain in tall grass, his platoon flattened down close around him, waiting to tap the shoulders of a Lewis gunner.ar He saw the two pictures together with somewhat the same primitive exaltation—two games he had played, differing in quality of acerbity, linked in a way that differed them from Rosalind or the subject of labyrinths which were, after all, the business of life.
“I am selfish,” he thought.