ANTHONY PATCH
In 1913, when Anthony Patch was twenty-five, two years
were already gone since irony, the Holy Ghost of this
later day, had, theoretically at least, descended
upon him. Irony was the final polish of the shoe,
the ultimate dab of the clothes-brush, a sort of intellectual
“There!”—yet at the brink of
this story he has as yet gone no further than the
conscious stage. As you first see him he wonders
frequently whether he is not without honor and slightly
mad, a shameful and obscene thinness glistening on
the surface of the world like oil on a clean pond,
these occasions being varied, of course, with those
in which he thinks himself rather an exceptional young
man, thoroughly sophisticated, well adjusted to his
environment, and somewhat more significant than any
one else he knows.
This was his healthy state and it made him cheerful,
pleasant, and very attractive to intelligent men and
to all women. In this state he considered that
he would one day accomplish some quiet subtle thing
that the elect would deem worthy and, passing on,
would join the dimmer stars in a nebulous, indeterminate
heaven half-way between death and immortality.
Until the time came for this effort he would be Anthony
Patch—not a portrait of a man but a distinct
and dynamic personality, opinionated, contemptuous,
functioning from within outward—a man who
was aware that there could be no honor and yet had
honor, who knew the sophistry of courage and yet was
brave.
Anthony drew as much consciousness of social security
from being the grandson of Adam J. Patch as he would
have had from tracing his line over the sea to the
crusaders. This is inevitable; Virginians and
Bostonians to the contrary notwithstanding, an aristocracy
founded sheerly on money postulates wealth in the
particular.
Now Adam J. Patch, more familiarly known as “Cross
Patch,” left his father’s farm in Tarrytown
early in sixty-one to join a New York cavalry regiment.
He came home from the war a major, charged into Wall
Street, and amid much fuss, fume, applause, and ill
will he gathered to himself some seventy-five million
dollars.
This occupied his energies until he was fifty-seven
years old. It was then that he determined, after
a severe attack of sclerosis, to consecrate the remainder
of his life to the moral regeneration of the world.
He became a reformer among reformers. Emulating
the magnificent efforts of Anthony Comstock, after
whom his grandson was named, he levelled a varied
assortment of uppercuts and body-blows at liquor,
literature, vice, art, patent medicines, and Sunday
theatres. His mind, under the influence of that
insidious mildew which eventually forms on all but
the few, gave itself up furiously to every indignation
