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.
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.
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."
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.
EMBARKING AT NIGHT
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:
"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.
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."
A letter from Amory, headed "Brest, March 11th, 1919," to Lieutenant T. P. D'Invilliers, Camp Gordon, Ga.
DEAR BAUDELAIRE:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
S'ever, dear Boswell, SAMUEL JOHNSON.
