We are new men

"But of course," he said, in the kind of drawing room lit only by lamps with green-glazed shades, "you can't expect moral discipline, not anymore. The foundations of past times were as concrete as a sidewalk or a Soviet apartment building. Today we do not simply forget to believe. We can't possibly begin to imagine what belief really is! And so you see the absurdity of any appeal to the old staples of that handsome, well-ordered time. The human mind was in chains then, of course, but as the Negro chain gang on the road it was disciplined by the hardness of its circumstance and nourished by the sureness of hierarchy, until its body grew too large and strong for those chains and broke free. And now we stand upon our ruined shackles in an age of muscularity. Not with the wiry strength of the yeoman that hurls the pick and axe over day upon day, but with the dumbell-and-calisthentic physique which the scientists of strength test and refine with their own flesh, must we understand our future to lie."

His son listened to this and nodded, for his father declaimed often on this subject and it brought him a warm sense of reassurance to hear it repeated. It was perhaps also that this room made him almost giddy, so strong was his the feeling it gave him in what he was not embarrassed to call his soul. The desk and the bookcases were older than he. Their constancy reminded him of what he believed he would enjoy in siblings, had he had any who had not died before his birth. He had sat often on a little wooden chair the maid would bring in especially for him, sat and regarded his father while he drew like a winter's wool coat around himself the mystery of his affairs. They rarely spoke, the old man an orthodox adherent of the silence-of-children school, but that did not bother his son overly much; he took pleasure in his other senses, delighting even now in the scribbling of a pen or the vaguely racy sound of a seal pushed into hot wax.

He loved his father as he thought one ought to, which is to say in the fashion of an Israelite to his dangerously equivocal, but nonetheless paternal, God. And so he was only too glad, now as a young man, to sit in the study in the chair reserved for his father's associates and nod agreeably at the old man's lecture. Nor was it merely affectation, his compliance, for in this house he knew the blessings of certitude and consistency, blessings for which he prostrated himself before his progenitor with absolute faith that they had been bestowed by him.

His father was looking into the fireplace although it was unlit.

"Yes, my son, yours will not be a life grounded in religion, but do not curse this fact. Naturally you will never be a man of greatness such as once pierced as the dawn the night of the soul that shrouded ages past. What man now sees within himself with such clarity as Buddha or Christ? This nearsightedness is no fault of physical infirmity. The laws of evolution have made ironclad the proposition that the body is no less motivated by progress than is the force of history itself! No, it is simply that that into which they gazed was made luminous by a thing, at once magnificent and primitive, that burned hotter than the purest manganese. That was the soul, my son. For if it is that ours is an age of great bodily hypertrophy, yesterday it was within a man that one found the same mightiness of sinew. You cannot be so strong within, so embrace it without."

He had been taking a cigar out of the humidor in the desk's top drawer while he spoke, and now stopped speaking in order to snip and then light one for himself. He did not extend the same courtesy to his son, and, from the settling of his brow and the way his eyes lost their focus, it was probably the case that to do so had not occurred to him. There was quiet, and it stretched on without showing any signs of stopping as the clock added each second. Eventually it became clear that the old man was finished and his son was to recognize that their company was meant to be parted.

He hardly noticed the telegram in government off-beige on the edge of his father's desk as he was walking out of the office, for he thought he heard the sound of a woman crying in the hallway, and was sure it was his mother. The old man, too, no longer seemed happy, his cheeks having crept up even as his brow had slumped down.

In the doorway, he glanced down at the newspaper he had brought with him into the study.

"Oh, but the Prussians have gone to Belgium," he remarked to his father before stepping out. The old man remained silent. His son frowned, took in the scent of the office as he left, and, smiling, died in the Ardennes two weeks later.