Victorians, Victorians, who never learned to weep Who sowed the bitter harvest that your children go to reap-scribbled Amory in his note-book. The lecturer was saying something about Tennyson's solidity and fifty heads were bent to take notes. Amory turned over to a fresh page and began scrawling again.
"They shuddered when they found what Mr. Darwin was about, They shuddered when the waltz came in and Newman hurried out--"
But the waltz came in much earlier; he crossed that out.
"And entitled A Song in the Time of Order," came the professor's voice, droning far away. "Time of Order"--Good Lord! Everything crammed in the box and the Victorians sitting on the lid smiling serenely.... With Browning in his Italian villa crying bravely: "All's for the best." Amory scribbled again.
"You knelt up in the temple and he bent to hear you pray, You thanked him for your 'glorious gains'--reproached him for 'Cathay.'"
Why could he never get more than a couplet at a time? Now he needed something to rhyme with: "You would keep Him straight with science, tho He had gone wrong before..."
Well, anyway....
"You met your children in your home--'I've fixed it up!' you cried, Took your fifty years of Europe, and then virtuously--died."
"That was to a great extent Tennyson's idea," came the lecturer's voice. "Swinburne's Song in the Time of Order might well have been Tennyson's title. He idealized order against chaos, against waste."
At last Amory had it. He turned over another page and scrawled vigorously for the twenty minutes that was left of the hour. Then he walked up to the desk and deposited a page torn out of his note-book.
"Here's 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.