THE LAST CHAPTER
I
PHIL FARMER and Jimmy Kane stayed on in New Haven that summer of 1914; Phil to be near his precious sources in the Yale library; Jimmy to be near his new job. As soon as his examinations were over he had gone to work in a factory in a very humble capacity; but he was not destined to remain there long in any capacity, nor was it written in the stars that he was to complete his education at Yale.
My own reasons for clinging to New Haven were less definite. Sheer physical inertia had something to do with it, no doubt; but chiefly I stayed because New Haven in midsummer is a social desert; and in those days my most urgent desire was to be alone. Apart from all else, the breaking out of almost world-wide war had drastically, as if by an operation for spiritual cataract, opened my inner eye, no longer a bliss in solitude, to much that was trivial and self-satisfied and ridiculous in one Ambrose Hunt, Esq. That Susan should be in the smoke of that spreading horror brought it swiftly and vividly before me. I lived the war from the first.
For years, with no felt discomfort to myself, I had been a pacifist. I was a contributing member of several peace societies, and in one of my slightly better-known essays I had expounded with enthusiasm Tolstoy's doctrine—which, in spite of much passionate argument to the contrary these troublous times, was assuredly Christ's—of nonresistance to evil. I was, in fact, though in a theoretical, parlor sense a proclaimed Tolstoyan, a Christian anarchist—lacking, however, the essential groundwork for Tolstoy's doctrine: faith. Faith in God as a person, as a father, I could not confess to; but the higher anarchist vision of humanity freed from all control save that of its own sweet reasonableness, of men turned unfailingly gentle, mutually helpful, content to live simply if need be, but never with unuplifted hearts—well, I could and did confess publicly that no other vision had so strong an attraction for me!
I liked to dwell in the idea of such a world, to think of it as a possibility—less remote, perhaps, than mankind in general supposed. Having lived through the Spanish War, the Boer War, and Russia's war with Japan; and in a world constantly strained to the breaking point by national rivalries, commercial expansion, and competition for markets; by class struggles everywhere apparent; by the harsh, discordant energies of its predatory desires—I, nevertheless, had been able to persuade myself that the darkest days of our dust-speck planet were done with and recorded; Earth and its graceless seed of Adam were at last, to quote Jimmy, "on their way"—well on their way, I assured myself, toward some inevitable region of abiding and beneficent light!
Pouf! . . . And then?
Stricken in solitude, I went down into dark places and fumbled like a starved beggar amid the detritus of my dreams. Dust and shadow. . . . Was there anything real there, anything worth the pain of spiritual salvage? Had I been, all my life, merely one more romanticist, one more sentimental trifler in a universe whose ways were not those of pleasantness, nor its paths those of peace? Surely, yes; for my heart convicted me at once of having wasted all my days hitherto in a fool's paradise. The rough fabric of human life was not spun from moonshine. So much at least was certain. And nothing else was left me. Hurled from my private, make-believe Eden, I must somehow begin anew.
"Brief beauty, and much weariness. . . ."