Read Online Honorable Men by Louis Auchincloss - Free Book Online Page A

seemed to indicate that he gave it up. “Well, remember, please, that you are strong. Think, before you raise your hand to another, that you may hurt him sorely. I do not wish, Charles, to hear of another incident like this.”
    When the great west window in the chapel, showing the warrior saints in all their fiery glory, Saint Joan, Saint George, Saint Louis, and the fighting kings, David, Joshua, Saul, was dedicated to the memory of the twenty Saint Luke’s boys who had perished in the Great War, Mr. B, who had shared their hell as an army chaplain, was particularly eloquent.
    â€œIt is not fashionable today to say there is a right or a wrong side in war, much less to claim that God Himself ever chooses sides. But I impenitently believe that God
was
with the Allies in 1917. It was my privilege to have been at the front with our boys and I knew He was with us! It was not that grave wrongs had not been perpetrated by the Allied Nations in dealing with their empires and with other countries. But when our troops went over the top to stem the advance of German aggression,
then,
at that point anyway, boys, God was with us! You couldn’t have been there, you couldn’t have seen what they did and how they died, without feeling it! Oh, true, God never forgot the Germans, and He loves them, too—every bit as much as He loves us—but He didn’t want them to win!”
    At that moment Chip wished that he could have been one of those boys who had fought and died in France. So brave an ending might have redeemed him. For surely among the millions who had perished in the mire of the trenches there must have been some who had burned with his lusts: lust for naked girls, lust for naked boys, lust for self; and afflicted with his doubts: doubts of Mummie, doubts of Daddy, doubts of God. He had no doubts of Mr. B, but wasn’t Mr. B an innocent? What did he know of hell?

6. CHIP
    C HIP HAD an initial distrust of the boys from New York City, who made up almost half his class, but it was a feeling that he could relax in favor of any individual who proved to be friendly. He had been brought up not to accept the superior airs of the big city; his parents had always emphasized that to hail from Benedict was every bit as good as being one of the teeming millions of Manhattan, if not better. Nor was this simply a question of being a bulky frog in an exiguous puddle. It was a question of living in a fine, clean, God-fearing town, surrounded by a beautiful countryside and blessed with breathable air, as opposed to a gray metropolis reeking with false pride and falser values. And, anyway, the Benedicts could call themselves New Yorkers, if it came to that; the company maintained a floor in a hotel on Madison Avenue where they could stay whenever they wished.
    But New Yorkers had a horrid way of making people feel like hicks; Chester “Chessy” Bogart was a perfect example of this. He came from undistinguished origins—he was a scholarship boy—and although an adequate athlete on the rare occasions when he chose to be, he was short, with a square bulldog countenance, thick black hair and malicious, grinning dark eyes. Yet his self-confidence was supreme; he made fun of everybody and fought like a tiger when his victims tried to beat him up. He sneered at all the accepted school values, used filthy language and earned the grudging respect of some of his classmates by the graphic way in which he described how he had “had” two girls at a summer camp when he was only fourteen.
    His mocking overture of friendship to Chip was certainly unconventional: “I guess you’re the kind of guy my old man sent me here to meet. Handsome, wealthy and aristocratic!”
    Chip was mildly shocked. He had been reared to believe that it was vulgar to refer to people’s money. And if you did, you said they were “rolling,” never “wealthy.”
    â€œWhy is Benedict any more aristocratic