Waste*

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Mr. Herrick Arraigns America's False Gods

The Story. Ostensibly the account of one man's life, this is in reality a keen, sweeping arraignment of the destructive forces of "Waste" which the author visions as imperilling the America of today. His protagonist, Jarvis Thornton, ultimately works out a philosophy which one dimly feels to be the author's own panacea—if, indeed, one can be found—for the danger.

It is not a matter of material values; it is the waste of spiritual forces which appals him: the sort of spiritual squalor which apparently has America so malignantly in its grip—dwarfing constructive endeavor, substituting pride of possession for pride of achievement.

In his college days Thornton first perceives these undermining forces at work; sees his classmates abandoning their first high, nebulous hopes of achievement, for some concrete form of business which will assure them wealth. And shortly after college, he is himself drawn into the menacing vortex, by a tragically mistaken marriage.

He becomes an engineer, an architect, finds himself driven to things against which his soul rebels, by the concrete and somehow sordid need for money. Fortunately, his wife concentrates on the financial, and thus does not drain him spiritually dry. So he retains his inner self, which continues to wrestle with the problem of adjusting things as they are with what he feels they ought to be.

Then comes the War, and in that searing horror he at last sees Truth, flaming, glorious, for the instant, in the awakened consciousness of the world. Yet even there, coexistent with the glory, are all the baser human instincts rearing themselves: treachery, greed, lust for power.

When the War has passed, so soon the glory dies that in the ensuing months of treaty-making, political bickering and intrigue, there comes to him the conviction that no matter who won the War, it has in truth been lost, and with it the Peace. It is all waste— waste of blood, and treasure—and spirit, the worst waste of all.

Then comes Cynthia—gay, wise, tender, apparently untouched by material standards. But in the end she also fails him—too much the product of her heritage and environment to escape them.

The solution Thornton finds for his disillusionment is at best a philosophy of compromise. He goes back to teaching in the technical school, saying: "If I can only save some of them from waste, the waste I went through, the waste of spirit I see everywhere about me in our life today, I shall be content. I don't know that it can be done, that waste is not inherent, inevitable, in the process of living, but it is worth the effort."