The Lonely Warrior
By CLAUDE C. WASHBURN
[Illustration]
A. L. BURT COMPANY
Publishers New York
Published by arrangement with Harcourt, Brace & Company
Printed in U. S. A.
COPYRIGHT, 1922, BY
HARCOURT, BRACE AND COMPANY, INC.
PRINTED IN THE U. S. A.
The Lonely Warrior
_PROLOGUE_
1
On the afternoon of the fifth day of November, 1914, Edward Carroll was
sitting as usual in his pleasant inner office, the windows of which
looked down upon the middle-western city where Mr. Carroll had lived for
forty of his fifty-six years. But he was not behaving quite as usual. At
this hour he should normally have been conferring with other men upon
matters of importance—matters concerning the cement works of which he
was vice-president, or the bank of which he was a director, or the
copper mines whose policy he principally determined. Or he should, at
the very least, have been dictating replies to half a dozen important
letters that had been placed on his desk while he was out at luncheon.
Instead, Mr. Carroll merely sat in his chair and stared oddly at a
calendar on the wall opposite, as though its large black announcement of
the date had some deep significance for him, as perhaps it had.
At last he shook his head impatiently and with a quick gesture pressed a
button in his desk. Almost at once his stenographer entered the room.
“Ruth,” said Mr. Carroll, “did you tell me a little while ago that some
one was waiting to see me?”
A faint surprise showed in the young woman’s composed face, but she
answered the question quietly. “Yes, sir. Mr. Barnett and Mr. King.”
“Well, they’ll have to wait a little or come some other time. I must see
Stacey first. He telephoned that he’d be here at three o’clock. It’s
three-five now,” Mr. Carroll observed, drawing out his watch; which was
quite unnecessary, since on the table before his eyes stood a small,
perfectly regulated clock encased in thick curved glass that magnified
its hands and characters conveniently. “When he comes send him in at
once,” he concluded.
But the stenographer had scarcely left the room when the door was opened
again and Stacey appeared.
He was a tall, handsome, well-built, young man, with blue eyes, short
brown hair, and a clear healthy complexion from which the summer tan had
even yet not quite faded. He looked, and was, well-bred and well
educated, but there was nothing unusual or distinguished in any of his
features, except perhaps in his mouth, which was finely modelled and
sensitive without being self-conscious. The only thing at all out of the
common about him was the impression he gave of restless but happy
eagerness, of being fresh and untired and curious. He appeared about
twenty-six or seven years old.
“Sit down, Stacey,” said Mr. Carroll. “You wanted to see me?”
“Yes, sir,” said the young man, and took the chair at the opposite side
of the desk.
There was a brief pause while the two gazed across at each other.
Neither could consider the other with cool detached estimation,—years
of familiarity were in the way; yet Stacey felt dimly that he was nearer
to being outside than he could remember to have been before. He studied
his father’s well-shaped head, with its thick gray hair, clipped
moustache and firm mouth, in something of the spirit in which, being an
architect, he would have studied a building. He saw his father to-day,
quite clearly, as a man of tremendous, never wasted energy, and with a
warm, generous, unspoiled heart. But it came over Stacey for the first
time that the same directness which made his father go so unerringly to
the point in business matters, discarding all non-essentials, made him
inclined to hold very positive over-simplified opinions about things in
general. Whereupon, all in this half-minute of silence, it also occurred
to Stacey that business was like mathematics, founded on definite
preassumed principles that you were always sure of, whereas
those—Stacey supposed they were there—beneath life seemed a trifle
wavering and indeterminate.
“Well, son, what was it?” asked Mr. Carroll.
“You know, father,” Stacey replied.
The older man pushed back his chair impatiently, and his face took on an
almost querulous expression that set small uncharacteristic wrinkles to
interfering oddly with its firm, deeply traced lines.
“Yes, I suppose I know what it is,” he said, “but I don’t see why you
should make me state it. You want to go to the war, and you have an
answer ready to every objection I can make. Damn it all, Stacey! It
isn’t our war! If it becomes so I’ll be the first to say: ‘Enlist!’ but
it isn’t—not yet, anyway.”
“You know you think it ought to be, father,” replied the young man
steadily. “I’ve heard you say so a score of times. Every one with any
generosity whom we know thinks it ought to be. I only want to live up to
that conviction. I believe it’s right against wrong, the—the—soul
against the machine; and so do you, or you wouldn’t have given so
generously to Belgium.”
His father did not seem to be listening. He was staring away over his
son’s head almost dreamily. “I remember when I built a play-house for
you and Julie back of the stable. You were six years old and tried to
carry two-by-fours to me. You didn’t succeed.”
He paused and looked at his son again.
“Stacey,” he went on, “I sent you to school and college for nine years,
and then for two years all over Europe, and then for three years to the
Beaux Arts in Paris. It’s taken—how old are you?”
“Thirty.”
“You don’t look it. It’s taken thirty careful years to educate you.
You’re an expensive instrument ready for use. Are you going to throw all
that away to do what some untrained laborer can do as well—no, better
than you? Are all those years of training going to be to fit you for no
other service than to—to stop a machine-gun bullet?”
“They ought not to be, father,” said the young man. “They wouldn’t be in
a normal world. They were given me in a normal world for use in a normal
world. But all of a sudden the normal world has been upset. It’s been
wickedly assailed, wiped out for the moment, by the greatest crime in
history. It’s up to every one of us to help bring it back. And all over
Europe better men than I, men equally well educated, have given
themselves freely—poets, painters, thinkers,—and trained
business-men,” he added hastily.
However, it did not for an instant occur to Stacey to question the
justice of his father’s argument. It seemed to him the only considerable
argument against his going to war, and he again respectfully recognized
his father’s ability to go straight to the essential point.
“But you see, sir,” he said, “that, true as your contention is for the
world as it was—and isn’t, it doesn’t hold good now. For it would be
equally true if America were in the war, yet then you would, as you
said, be the first to want me to go.”
“But—”
“I know. America isn’t in the war—yet; but every single trivial example
like mine will help, just a little, to bring her in.”
There was a moment of silence.
“What about me, Stacey?” Mr. Carroll asked at last.
The young man gazed at his father sadly. “I know,” he said. “It’s
horrible. But all over the world it’s going on. The same question’s
being asked—and set aside—in thousands and thousands of families.
And—though it isn’t adequate compensation—you still at least have your
work; which is more than wives and mothers have.”
At this Mr. Carroll pushed his chair back sharply. “My work!” he
exclaimed angrily. “Who’s it for? For you, every bit of it! For you and
Julie.”
After all, Stacey was young and had a sense of the ridiculous; so
laughter surged up within him now and, though he kept it silent,
relieved his tensity. For he was earning a respectable salary from the
firm of architects in which he would soon have a junior partnership, and
his father had long since given him two-hundred-thousand dollars’ worth
of excellent municipal and industrial bonds, some bearing five, some
five-and-a-half per cent.; while, as for his sister Julie, she not only
had a strictly equal private fortune, but was also comfortably married
to a prosperous young lawyer. But, knowing his father, and knowing him
better than usual to-day, Stacey carefully kept his amusement to
himself.
It vanished anyway when his father added: “And Marian?”—and Stacey
winced.
“I haven’t told her yet. I’m going to tell her to-night,” he said, a
little hoarsely. “It’ll almost break her heart, I’m afraid. All the
Marians in the world are having their hearts broken to-day.”
“And all the fathers and mothers. I could pretty nearly say: ‘Thank God
your mother is not living!’”
Stacey nodded grave assent. “The individual’s gone by the board.” After
which silence fell upon both men.
At last the older man drew himself together. “What army?” he asked. “The
French?”
“No, I thought of that, since I speak French decently,” said his son
briskly, glad of the change in mood. “But I rather think—though I’m not
sure—that I’d have to join the Foreign Legion there. And sacrifice is
all very well, you know, but it needn’t be suicide. I mean to come back
alive if I can do so honorably. And of course I’ve thought of the
Canadian army. But there’s too much neighborly dislike between Canadians
and Americans. So I’m going into the English army, if they’ll take me.
I’ve a lot of friends in England, you know. I’ve visited some of them at
their homes. They’ll all be in as officers. Perhaps I can get into some
regiment where I’ll be under one of them.”
“And you leave?”
“Next Wednesday. I’ll catch the ‘Mauretania.’ Don’t be angry with me,
sir,” he begged.
His father shook his head. “No,” he replied dully, “I suppose as a
matter of fact I’d have done the same thing at your age.”
“It’s the kindest thing you could say to me,” said the young man, with a
deep sigh of relief. He rose. “I mustn’t keep you any longer now. The
office is full of people waiting to see you. I say, dad, to-night I—I
must go to see Marian, but to-morrow night let’s dine at the club
together and have champagne and then go to a show and be awfully gay!”
“All right,” said his father.
They shook hands, and Stacey departed.
But when the door had closed behind him Mr. Carroll did not at once
summon his stenographer. Instead, he sat gazing, as before Stacey’s
arrival, at the calendar on the wall opposite. At last he rose, crossed
the room, and tore off the leaf—“Nov. 5.” He folded the paper once
across and placed it carefully in his pocket-book.
Then he returned to his chair and pressed the button in his desk.
2
Stacey Carroll was not more unusual than most men, but he was as much
so. The only difference was that his diversity had been fostered by his
education, and that he was not ashamed of it, but clung to it as
something of value, desiring only to suppress the appearance of it. He
was healthy and vigorous mentally as well as physically, mixed easily
with his fellows, and was as usual on the surface as were they—on the
surface. But really he was unusual in being extraordinarily sensitive to
impressions, to whatever was beautiful (provided it was also faintly
exotic)—in short, to whatever was fine and delicate and fanciful.
And if one asks how it came about that, with this characteristic, he was
content to live in the city of Vernon, which had two hundred thousand
inhabitants, was situated in Illinois, was not very beautiful, and
certainly had no touch of the exotic about it, the answer is that he was
not—with this part of him. The part was not by any means the whole.
With a great deal of the rest of him Stacey very much liked living in
Vernon. He liked many Vernon people, he liked the physical comforts of
his existence, and he did not dislike being a member of one of the
city’s most prominent families. He had a great capacity for liking both
people and things. He could perceive bad in them, but quite
instinctively his mind singled out and dwelt on the good. Moreover, it
should at once be said for Vernon that it differed from the average
middle-western city of two hundred thousand inhabitants. Being close to
Chicago it was metropolitan in feeling; plays came to it and music; its
citizens—the ones Stacey knew—were sophisticated, well informed,
almost too up-to-date; the houses that they built—often with Stacey’s
help—were modern and handsome. The provincial spirit had long since
vanished from Vernon.
And, after all, Stacey’s very eccentricity—his delight in what was
wistful and lovely,—though it would certainly have been better
satisfied in Paris, was not altogether starved in Vernon, as a love of
classic line might have been. Books and music fed it; and where in the
whole world could he have found more perfect satisfaction of it than in
Marian Latimer?
For the three years that he had known her, to enter the door of the
house in which she and her parents lived had been to him like crossing
the threshold of fairy-land. Outside there might be street-cars and
motors and the smell of soft coal; within there was charm and grace and
peace—not stupid peace, tingling peace—and Marian, who embodied them
all, with so much more, and spread them about her.
Never until this evening had Stacey entered the Latimer house without
experiencing a sudden sense of buoyancy. But to-night his heart was so
heavy that it seemed to weigh his whole body down. He had a curious
feeling that he must tread carefully or he would break something.
In the narrow Colonial hallway he gave his coat and hat to the maid,
then went into the drawing-room, which was white and spacious, though
the house was small.
Mr. and Mrs. Latimer were there; Marian was not. Marian was never there.
She was always coming from somewhere else or going somewhere else—both
in space and time. At least, that was the impression she left lovingly
in Stacey. Not that she was full of futile restlessness. It was only
that her charm was the charm of movement, of running water, of a
humming-bird. Mentally as well as physically—oh, far more!—she paused
only at moments in her flittings. You hardly ever caught her. But that
made the rare moment more precious.
Her parents greeted Stacey with quiet cordiality and made him sit down
beside them in front of the open fire that, in the semi-darkness of the
room, set reflections glowing here and there across the yellow of
polished brass and the cool rich surface of statuettes.
“Marian will be down soon, I’ve no doubt,” said her father, with a low
laugh at having said it so many times before.
Stacey considered him, feeling much the same appreciation he felt for
Marian—only without the thrill and the sense of enchantment.
And, indeed, Mr. Latimer deserved appreciation. He was slim and
straight, and his head was the head of a Greek youth grown old. Curly
white hair, straight nose, short upper lip,—nothing was wrong. His
profile, at which Stacey gazed now, was clear and perfect, like
Marian’s. Until three years ago Mr. Latimer had lived, with his wife and
daughter, his books, his pictures, and his Chinese vases, in Italy; and
certainly a Florentine villa seemed the properer setting. For the life
of him Stacey could not understand why the Latimers should have returned
to live in America, and of all places in America should have chosen
Vernon, Illinois, even if it was Mr. Latimer’s birthplace. But Stacey
was devoutly grateful that they had done so. He rather thought it was
due to Mrs. Latimer, and he was glad to think so, since it gave him
something to like her for.
Mrs. Latimer, in fact, worried Stacey a little, because he could not
make her out. She, too, was handsome in a way, but she seemed to Stacey
not to be in the picture, but aloof, dispassionately commenting on
everything and every one, including himself, her daughter, her husband,
and her husband’s Chinese vases. Stacey recognized honorably that this
was probably only his fancy; for Mrs. Latimer never passed such comment
aloud. She was habitually quiet, letting others talk; but she was
certainly not stupid. Sometimes she would laugh suddenly and
spontaneously when neither Stacey nor Mr. Latimer had seen anything
amusing until her laughter caught them up, and sent them back to look
again, and made them laugh too, always appreciatively.
“You’re grave to-night, Stacey,” said Mr. Latimer, turning his eyes to
the young man’s face. “I suppose it’s this catastrophic war. Of course
it’s to your credit that you’re capable of feeling it intensely; the
fact reveals a precious un-American gift of imagination. But you’re
wrong, all the same, to let the thought of the war weigh you down, you
know. I’m increasingly convinced that each man has a world of his own
and that this is the only world in which he can profitably live. I’m
more convinced of it than ever now when I see painters and philosophers
and musicians dropping their arts and engaging in violent, quite futile
polemics on something outside their own worlds. A painter’s ideas on,
say, the correct method of building a sewer are without value; so also
are his ideas on war. He wastes his own time and that of others in
expressing them. To each man his own world. To you building noble
houses. To me collecting vases. Also we have properly an outlet for our
emotion there. We have no outlet for emotion concerning the war. That’s
harmful.”
Stacey had listened to the melodious flow of Mr. Latimer’s words with a
faint unaccustomed irritation. He could see no flaw in the argument;
logically Mr. Latimer was right. Yet, even if uselessly and wastefully,
how could one help abandoning cool logic while the terrible waves of the
war flooded in from every side? Just as that afternoon it had occurred
to Stacey that success in business entailed an over-simplified view of
life, so now it occurred to him that success in living entailed too neat
a perfection. Actually the two results were not so very far apart. How
odd! “Of course,” he added to himself, “he does not know that I _have_
found an outlet for my emotion about the war.” But Stacey was not going
to tell Mr. Latimer of this. He was going to tell Marian—if she would
only come.
“It’s the ‘_tour d’ivoire_’ theory, sir,” he said, after a brief pause.
“I dare say—”
But fingers brushed his hair and forehead, and his words ceased
abruptly, while his heart gave a bound, and a slow thrill crept over
him.
“Marian!” he cried.
But she was gone already and smiling at him mischievously from the arm
of her father’s chair.
“I wonder,” Stacey said appealingly to Mrs. Latimer, “if you’d think me
very abrupt in asking Marian to go up to the library with me. There’s
something I want to talk over with her.”
Mrs. Latimer looked at the young man steadily, for the first time since
his entrance. “No,” she said quietly, “do go.”
“I wonder,” said Marian gaily, “whether Marian is going to have anything
to say about it.” But then, before the earnestness of Stacey’s
expression, she ceased smiling and led him away.
Upstairs in the library she made him sit down in an easy chair and
perched herself on an ottoman at his feet. She was admirably quick in
responding to moods and she looked up at Stacey now with a tender
gravity. He longed to stretch out his hand and touch her and draw her to
him. But he knew that if he did so she would slip away from him to
become all motion and fluidity again; so he merely sat and gazed at her
fair curly hair, her eyes, her small mouth, and the delicate contour of
her cheeks, thinking her like a Tanagra come to life.
“Marian dearest,” he said at last, “I’ve made up my mind about
something—all alone, without asking you first, because if I’d asked you
I’d have made it up wrong, no matter what you said. Marian, I’m going to
the war.”
For just an instant the girl continued to gaze up at him, clearly not
taking it in. Then her face flamed with eagerness.
“Oh, Stacey!” she cried, her eyes shining. “Oh, Stacey!”
But Stacey’s heart had all at once grown intolerably heavy with pain.
It is true that the very next instant Marian’s mouth drooped and she
cried: “Oh, Stacey!” again in a different lower tone, and suddenly was
in the young man’s arms and kissing him tenderly.
But, though Stacey was made dizzy with love, the pain endured. As long
as he lived, he felt, he would remember that Marian’s first thought had
been that he was going to be a hero; that he was going away from her
into that horrid mess across the Atlantic, perhaps to be killed, only
her second thought. This perception did not develop into criticism of
Marian. Stacey was incapable of criticizing Marian. She was perfect. It
was simply a wound—the first the war inflicted on him.
And also he felt dimly that since this morning all the fine clarity of
his life had given place to confusion. His reaction to everything was
hopelessly different. Throughout the evening Marian was prodigal of her
grace, showered him with impulsive expressions of affection; yet,
instead of sheer loving delight in her, such things stirred him to
physical and mental desire, desire to possess this girl, body and soul.
He flushed with shame. He had never felt this way before; or, if he had,
he had not known it.
When at last it was so late that Stacey simply must not stay longer,
Marian accompanied him downstairs, her hand in his. They looked into the
drawing-room so that he might say good night to her parents, but the
room was empty. Only a single shaded lamp had been left burning, and the
fire on the hearth was flickering to ashes.
“I suppose papa’s at the club, and probably mamma has gone to bed,” said
the girl, in the hushed tone that dark and emptiness induce.
“It’s awfully late,” he replied remorsefully.
She drew away from him to a distant dim corner, from which her face
shone palely like a white flower in the night.
“Stacey,” she called softly, “come here!”
He obeyed, and all at once her slender arms were about his neck, pulling
his head down, her fragrant hair was against his face, and her lips were
pressed to his in such a willing kiss as she had never given him before.
It left him trembling from head to foot. His heart beat madly. He could
not speak.
But she could. “_Now_ will you forget me, Stacey?” she murmured, with a
low mischievous laugh.
Whatever she felt, it was certainly not what he was feeling. Well, that
was right. He was glad of that—he supposed.
In the hall, however, she did not laugh. “Oh, Stacey,” she said, “come
every day until you go! Come twice a day, three times! Come all day
long!”
He kissed her fingers and stumbled dizzily out of the door.
When he reached the sidewalk a woman, muffled in a heavy fur coat, came
toward him. “Mrs. Latimer!” he cried out in surprise, when she was close
to him.
“I wanted to speak to you alone, Stacey,” she said. “So when I heard you
leave the library I slipped on a coat and came out here.”
Stacey was genuinely touched, but also apprehensive—as one always is
toward the mother of one’s fiancée—for fear that she was going to
reprove him for something in his behavior to her daughter.
“Oh, but I’ve kept you a long time!” he stammered. “Aren’t you cold?”
“Stacey,” said Mrs. Latimer, looking gravely into the young man’s face,
“you’re going to the war.”
“How did you know?” he exclaimed.
“I’ve seen it coming for many days,” she replied, “and to-night I was
sure. You came to tell Marian.”
“Yes. How very, very good of you to want to speak to me and to wait for
me here outside!”
She shook her head. “Come! Let’s walk up and down for a few minutes,”
she said, and took his arm.
“Mrs. Latimer,” he begged, “you’re not going to tell me that I’m wrong?
It’s been so hard for me to decide. You’re not going to tell me that I
owe it to Marian to stay? It would be so sweet to stay!”
“Oh, no! Oh, no! no! no!” she replied. Then, after a pause: “How did
Marian take it?”
“She was a dear!” he said loyally, but with a sinking feeling at his
heart. “She has never been so kind to me before.”
“Was she glad you were going to be a hero?”
He started. This was uncanny. But he felt resentment, too. “Marian is so
fine,” he said a little stiffly. “She sees things in flashes. She looks
through the—the ugly facts to the glory beneath them. I’m not a hero—I
know it only too well; but Marian sees only the collective recognition
that I and a thousand others are giving of—of—the existence of
something deeper than facts—of an idea.” He shook his head, unable to
express his thought, and uneasily conscious that he was defending
Marian—not very well, either.
“My dear boy,” Mrs. Latimer returned, “please believe that I am not
blaming Marian for anything. I recognize as clearly as you do all her
fineness. Marian lives in a palace. And when you live properly in a
palace, perfectly at home there, you have palatial thoughts. But, you
see, I don’t live in a palace. I’m of coarser clay. You don’t know me
very well, Stacey, but I know you, I think. And I felt I must see you
for a few minutes.”
He was moved by her kindness and murmured his gratitude.
“But I don’t really know,” she went on, “what it is I want to say.
Nothing, perhaps. Certainly nothing that is clear. The world is a welter
of confusion.”
He nodded assent, feeling closely and comfortingly drawn to this
middle-aged woman who had always seemed aloof to him before.
Mrs. Latimer did not speak again for several minutes. “How do I know
what war does?” she continued at last. “How should you know, for that
matter? But, Stacey, if it changes you in odd deep ways that you can’t
conceive of now—nor I, either—don’t, please don’t, suffer too much and
blame yourself for the changes. There’ll be so much suffering you’ll
have to go through anyway that it would be a pity to add to it
unnecessarily.”
He shook his head. “I don’t think I understand, Mrs. Latimer.”
“How in the world should you?” she replied. “I don’t, either. I only
feel something rather vaguely. But there is one thing clear, my dear
boy. I want you to be certain that you have a sincere affectionate
friend in me, who will always try her puzzled best to understand you
sympathetically. And that was really all I had to say.”
“Oh, thank you!” he cried, genuinely touched.
“Now take me home,” she added. “We must go carefully around the house
and I’ll let myself in at the back door so that Marian won’t know I’ve
been out.” She laughed. “Think of your having an assignation with your
mother-in-law and having to conceal it from her daughter!”
But when Stacey had seen Mrs. Latimer safely enter the back door of her
house, and was walking home along the deserted streets, though he felt
warmed and comforted by her unexpected intelligent friendship, he also
felt an uneasy sense of disloyalty, as though he and she had become
accomplices in a secret league against Marian.
3
Stacey arrived in New York one afternoon about a week later. His boat
was to sail the next morning. He went to the small hotel on Tenth Street
where he always stayed.
“How do you do, Mr. Carroll? Glad to see you, sir,” said the clerk.
Stacey wasted no time, but dropped his suitcase in his room and set off
immediately up-town on the top of a motor-bus.
It was clear dry weather, not too cold, and the city’s buildings stood
out sharply against a brilliant sky. Stacey had never liked this
glittering hardness in the atmosphere of New York. The Metropolitan
Tower wouldn’t be so bad and the Woolworth would be bully, he had often
thought, if only they would soar up dimly into a softening haze, as they
would in Paris. The whole show was good, but not good enough to stand
this crude vivid light. Nothing could stand it—neither façades nor
human faces. It was like an immense close-up at the movies. And to-day,
since he continued to feel about him and within himself so much
confusion, this effect of physical clarity really made him uneasy.
But the discomfort soon faded and he thought only that he was to have
this whole afternoon and evening with Philip Blair. He took the stuffy
elevator in the Harlem apartment house, stepped out, and hurried down
the dark hall to Philip’s door with no other feeling than gladness.
Philip himself opened the door, and his face showed as warm a pleasure
as his guest’s. He was thin and slight almost to emaciation, with keen
prominent blue eyes, a sharp-cut nose whose nostrils seemed to sniff
like a dog’s, and a short fair moustache. He looked like a medieval
ascetic, superficially modernized. Just at present he was in
shirt-sleeves and held a pair of compasses in one hand. With the other
he shook Stacey’s eagerly.
“By Jove, I’m glad to see you!” he cried. “But why do you give me only a
day? Why didn’t you come and stay a week? Come on in!” And he led Stacey
down a narrow hall and through the dining-room into his study.
“Couldn’t do it,” Stacey replied on the way. “Whole business so sudden.”
“Yes, I suppose so,” the other assented quietly.
“What you working on?” asked Stacey, leaning over the drawing-board in
the study and fumbling abstractedly at the same time with a pile of
sketches that lay, curled up anyhow, on a table close-by.
“Public library for a village,” said Blair, pulling a sketch of the
front elevation from the rattling heap of papers, spreading it out on
the board, and holding it down flat.
Together they leaned over it. Stacey nodded. “Fine!” he said. “Awfully
good! Let’s see. It’s not for a New England village. Where is it for?
Pennsylvania?”
“Pretty near. Western New York, close to the Pennsylvania line.”
Stacey continued to examine the drawing, then began to smile, poked his
finger at it with a wide curving gesture, and finally broke into a frank
laugh. “Always the same old Phil!” he said gaily, dropping into an easy
chair. “Quite incorrigible! Don’t you ever remember how many shameful
‘_Hors Concours_’ you were always getting at the Beaux Arts, and how
disapprovingly old Fromelles used to shake his head over your _projets_,
and what they all used to think of you: ‘Too bad! Just a little vulgar!
Just a little vulgar!’”
Blair laughed with him, but after a moment Stacey became suddenly silent
and gazed with a puzzled frown at his friend, wondering how it was that
any one so physically frail as Blair could possess such creative
masculine vigor of mind.
“How are you getting on, Phil?” he asked abruptly.
Blair shrugged his shoulders. “Oh, all right enough,” he answered
lightly. “I scrape along without too much difficulty. It would be easier
in one way if I were to go in with some firm, but—”
“Never do—for you, never in the world!” Stacey interrupted, shaking his
head. “You’d feel crushed.”
“Yes, I’d rather go it on my own. I’m all right. Absolutely the only
thing that bothers me is not getting enough jobs. I don’t mean because I
need them financially, but because—you know how it is—to learn, a man
has to see his work in actual stone and brick.”
“You’re too damned good!” said Stacey hotly. “You’ve got the real stuff
in you. Here am I, prospering like a—like a pork packer, while you
struggle along unappreciated; yet you’re a thousand times better than
I.”
“You’re too generous and loyal, Stacey,” Blair returned, with a shake of
his fair head. “I couldn’t ever reach your delicacy in detail.”
“Detail, yes,” Stacey muttered. “I—” He, too, shook his head, while his
friend gazed at him with a calm clear smile. “Lack of vulgarity is the
curse of more places than the Beaux Arts,” Stacey concluded suddenly.
“There’s a brand-new thought for you—brand-new so far as I’m concerned.
Make what you can of it, Phil.”
Philip Blair laughed. “Sounds interesting,” he said. “I’ll have to think
it over. Anyhow, you needn’t worry about me. I manage to scrape enough
together to live and keep Catherine and the boys going.”
“Where are the kiddies?”
“Out for a walk with her. They’ll be in soon.”
After this a silence, that perhaps both young men had felt lying in
wait, descended upon them. Blair was the first to meet frankly what it
stood for.
“So you’re going over into it, Stacey,” he said.
Stacey nodded. “I’ve got to.”
“Well,” said Blair slowly, after another pause, “I suppose, in view of
the tremendous issue, I ought to feel principally gladness that one bit
more of strength and courage is thrown into the right side of the
balance. But, do you know, I don’t—I can’t. Perhaps it’s because I’m
not big enough to get away from personal feelings. And yet I don’t think
it’s merely that. The truth is, Stacey, that you and I are
individualists. We were born like that and we’ve been brought up that
way. The profession we’ve chosen is individualistic—not perfectly so,
because we have to meet the ideas of our clients; but a good deal so,
all the same. For the very fact that people in general are so
standardized, unindividual, wanting in ideas of their own, makes them
leave pretty much in our hands the houses they hire us to build for
them.”
Stacey was smiling. He recognized with affectionate amusement a
characteristic of his friend’s mind—that inability to leave any side
issue of a theme unexplored before pursuing the main theme onward. How
different from Stacey’s father! And also how honest and thorough! Most
people thought that Philip had a wandering mind. He knew better.
For Philip always did come back to the theme. He was back in it now.
“We’re against the current,” he was saying sadly. “The whole trend of
the world is overwhelmingly toward collectivism, doing and feeling in
common, standardization. And yet—and yet—the unit _is_ the individual;
it can’t ever be the group. The individual’s a fact. There you have him,
complete, a world—his only one—to himself. The group’s a fiction, a
composite photograph, lifeless. Oh, I _know_ the whole trend of things
is wrong and that we’re right—so long as we harness our individualism
and don’t let it grow into a silly cult.
“Right?—wrong?” he went on musingly, staring off through the window.
“What do I mean by right and wrong? Well, I mean, I suppose, creatively
valuable, creatively harmful. And the war’s going to rush and swell the
advance of collectivism. No more art, no more thought, no more real
life! Not till long after the war is over. You’ll see.”
Well, it was what Stacey himself had told his father. But he hadn’t
perceived all that it meant. That was what you got for being
impressionistic instead of thorough, he told himself humbly.
Blair turned his eyes back slowly to his friend. “And that,” he
concluded, his thin face drawn with an expression of pain, “is
why—though I know you’ve _got_ to do it, and though I’d do it too, if I
had the bodily health—that is why I feel, above all, grief that you
must throw yourself into that inferno of awful physical and worse mental
suffering. Forgive me!” he cried remorsefully.
But the shadow that had come over Stacey’s face was not there because of
the prophecy of pain. Stacey was thinking of the contrast between
Philip’s words and Marian’s. “That’s all right, Phil,” he said quietly.
“It wasn’t what you said that bothered me. It was something else. Of
course I know what I’m going into—so far as one can know through his
imagination about something totally outside his experience. It’s a great
deal better to think of it beforehand and be ready.”
They dropped all talk of the war after this; and before long Philip’s
sons dashed in. Jack, the younger boy, who was two-and-a-half, ran at
once shyly to his father; but the older, who was five, gave his hand to
Stacey with a pretty confiding cordiality.
“How do you do, Uncle Stacey?” he said, with childish formality,
recently enough learned to demand care and effort.
“Hello, Carter,” returned Stacey, who liked the boy and liked being
called uncle.
The child leaned against his knee. “Uncle Stacey,” he exclaimed, his
soft eager face glowing, “will you do ‘Fly away, Jack! Fly away, Jill!’
for me? I think I can find them this time. I think I know where they
went.”
Philip Blair laughed. “Having achieved formality,” he said, “he puts it
behind him at once. ‘Something accomplished, something done, has earned
a night’s repose.’”
“Quite right, too,” Stacey replied. “I promise I will after just a
little while, Carter. Where’s your mother?”
“Here,” said Catherine, coming through the doorway. “It was windy out. I
had to fix my hair.”
She shook hands with Stacey, a little shyly and formally, almost like
her son.
“Let’s go into the sitting-room,” she said, in the abrupt way she had of
speaking. “There’s a pleasant fire in there.”
But when they had sat down in front of it they all became silent—all,
that is, save Jack, who, on the floor with his toys, babbled to himself
ceaselessly of a thousand important things. Even Carter was silent. He
sat on a foot-stool and gazed at Stacey from a little distance with
patient expectancy.
Stacey, however, had forgotten him. A dozen thoughts were moving through
the young man’s mind, yet not turbulently, but smoothly, without
interference, like ships on a wide river. Perhaps this was because he
was not thinking of himself at all, but of Phil and Catherine. He looked
at Catherine, sitting there across the hearth, she, too, apparently far
away in thought, and tried to study her objectively. She was tall and
dark and handsome, with high cheek-bones, a high forehead, and black
eyes set deep beneath long sweeping lashes. She had a magnificent
figure, lithe, supple and without opulence—slender, even,—but making
evident the large bony structure. So, too, with her head. It was like a
firm Mantegna drawing, revealing clearly what lay beneath the smooth
close-textured skin. Therefore in repose her face appeared even stern.
There was something sculpturesque about Catherine.
But these things were externals. What was she really like? Stacey could
not discover. In all the years that he had known her, first as Philip’s
fiancée and then as Philip’s wife, he had never got beneath her intense
shy reserve. Yet—which seemed odd—there was no sense of constraint
between them as long as Phil was there, too. Stacey could talk
impersonally with her, or, better still, sit for a long time silent with
her, as now, perfectly at ease and sure that she, too, felt at ease.
That was all, though. He could not understand the marriage. Still, he
recognized that it was a happy marriage and he admitted loyally that a
man very rarely did understand his most intimate friend’s choice of a
wife.
Sometimes, he remembered, he had tried to sum up Catherine and her
relation to Phil impressionistically. Once he had told himself that she
was like a castle and Philip like a wind blowing around it, rattling the
shutters but leaving the castle permanent and unchanged. But he felt a
touch of impatience now in the recollection of that judgment. He had
always been full of such fancies. Perhaps he had even cultivated them
and felt a small pride in them. Somehow, in these last weeks he had come
to feel almost antipathy for these baubles. What did they really
explain? What good did it do to catch a mood, even truly? What was a
mood but an evanescent unrelated thing?
But distaste for oneself does not suffice to alter one’s nature. Stacey
did not perceive that his present musings had the same quality they
disapproved of.
It was Carter who broke the silence—with a plaintive unconscious sigh.
Philip laughed, but his visitor started. “Oh, Carter, old chap,” he said
remorsefully, “I forgot all about Jack and Jill! I’m ready now. Come on
over.”
The child ran to him delightedly, all the ages and ages of tedious
waiting forgotten at once; and Stacey took a postage stamp from his
pocket, tore it carefully in half, and gummed the pieces to the nails of
his two forefingers. Experience had taught him that stamps were safer
than scraps of ordinary paper, which had an embarrassing way of coming
off.
“Two little black-birds sitting on a hill,
One named Jack and one named Jill.
Fly away, Jack!—Fly away, Jill!
. . . . . .
Come back, Jack!—Come back, Jill!”
Stacey performed the magic trick over and over again, while Carter
searched unavailingly for the birds’ hiding-place, sure that he would
find it the next time, and Jack, not understanding but delighted none
the less, trotted around tirelessly after his brother, and the November
twilight crept in through the windows and darkened the room. Then it was
time for the children to go to bed, and Catherine led them away, leaving
the two men together.
After a while she came back, and they all three went in to dinner.
Stacey glanced at the table appreciatively. “Phil has one human foible,
anyway,” he said to Catherine. “He never cared what he ate, but he’s
always been fastidious about how he eats it.”
Catherine gave him a rare smile, that softened her face to beauty. “Do
you mean,” she asked, “that all the setting is good, but the dinner
itself not?”
He laughed, pleased and surprised at the disappearance of her shyness.
“You know I don’t. How can I tell what the dinner’s like when
everything’s concealed beneath those heavy silver covers?”
He stayed until very late in the evening. It had always been Catherine’s
way to disappear rather early and leave her husband and Stacey to
themselves, no doubt because she knew that she had no real part in their
intimacy. But to-night, though she went out of the room from time to
time, she invariably returned. Indeed, she seemed different to Stacey.
It was, he thought, as though one thickness of the veil between them had
been stripped away. (Oh, Stacey! Dislike of impressionism?). Once he
caught her gazing at him with a melancholy intentness; but, seeing that
he was looking, she turned her eyes away at once and stared into the
fire.
The war was not mentioned; but, because there was no feverishness in the
talk or sense of constraint upon the three, Stacey felt that this
revealed no attempt to evade the war and his share in it. The war was
there and he was going to it. This was a simple fact, conceded by all
three. There was nothing to do about it or say about it. War was not a
part of their past or woven anyhow into the fabric of their minds. Not a
bit of use for conversation.
“I’ll be down at the boat to-morrow morning,” Phil said, when at last
Stacey rose to go.
“Thanks, Phil,” Stacey replied gratefully. “Good night, Catherine, and
thank you both—ever so much. I feel—bathed in quiet happiness.”
Catherine gave him her hand, with a murmured good night, then dropped it
abruptly.
“Shy once again,” thought Stacey with kindly amusement.
* * * * *
When the next day all good-byes had been said, and the great ship was
sweeping out to sea, and Stacey was walking to and fro alone on the
deck, with all his thirty years of life vanishing behind him, rounded
out, ended, a completed story, while between it and his present self a
mist began to rise, like the mist that was rising between ship and
shore, he gathered up the impressions the final week had left
him—gently, as one ties together old letters before putting them away.
And, stripping them down to essentials, he could find but this:—that
there was a sweet serenity in the memory of the afternoon and evening
with the Blairs, an odd sense of comfort in the picture of Mrs. Latimer
stepping towards him beneath the arc-light in front of her house,
and—yes—comfort again in the thought of Julie—his sister, Julie, with
whom he had never had anything in common save their relationship, but
the vision of whose good-humored face, stained with tears, and of whose
ridiculous efforts to make her eight-months-old baby say good-bye to
Uncle Stacey, recurred to him now gratefully. In the thought of Marian
there was only uneasy pain. Perhaps, he reflected sadly, this was just
because she had hurt his vanity, or perhaps it was because at such a
moment of leave-taking what one demanded was merely simple affection, or
perhaps it was because intense love must be uneasy and painful.
Well. . . .
He put the letters away and closed the drawer upon them.
_PART I_
CHAPTER I
“Funny! June is June. Permanent sort of thing. Looks, in 1919,
ridiculously the same as it looked in 1914.”
So Stacey Carroll reflected idly, as he stepped out into the fresh dusty
sunlight from the pier at the foot of West Twenty-Third Street. He wore
the uniform of a captain of infantry in the American army, with the red,
white and blue ribbon of the D. S. C.
He summoned a taxi with an imperious but economical gesture of the wrist
and forefinger, spoke two words to the chauffeur, flung in his bags
lightly, and set off for the small hotel on Tenth Street. During the
whole of the brief ride he looked out of the window, observantly enough,
but he did not appear to be affected one way or another by what he saw.
At any rate his face remained impassive until, when he had descended
from the taxi and entered the hotel, the clerk at the desk shook his
hand and said: “How do you do, Captain Carroll? Glad to see you safely
back, sir,” Then Stacey smiled in an odd twisted way that did not make
the expression of his mouth more genial or bring any expression at all
into his eyes.
In his room he lighted a cigarette, laid it on an ash-tray, and set
immediately to unpacking his bags, swiftly, systematically and without
haste, pausing only for an occasional puff at the cigarette. Three
minutes before he had finished unpacking he turned on the water in the
bath-tub. The bath was ready at almost the precise moment Stacey was
ready for it. He dressed with the same smooth uninterested efficiency he
had shown in unpacking and undressing. Only once did he make any
wasteful gesture. This was when, his foot coming in contact with one of
the puttees he had laid on the floor, he deliberately kicked the puttee
across the room.
Finally, when he had bathed and dressed and everything was put away,
Stacey looked in the telephone book, then called up Philip Blair’s
number.
“Phil? This is Stacey. . . . Yes. . . . Yes. . . . What? . . . Oh, just
now, a few minutes ago! . . . How’s that? . . . Oh, yes, perfectly
sound! No wooden leg, no false face, nothing at all! . . . Why didn’t I
_what_? (What the devil’s come over your telephone system?) . . . Oh,
write oftener! Well, I did! . . . Yes, of course. ’T’s what I telephoned
for. Sure! Be right up.”
Stacey’s voice had been cool and almost expressionless, but his face had
softened a little. After he had hung up the receiver he stood for a
moment gazing abstractedly ahead of him. Then he put on his hat and went
out of the hotel.
But he did not take a motor-bus. Instead, he set off up Fifth Avenue on
foot, with an easy sauntering gait that was faster than it looked. It
was not at all the way Stacey had walked in 1914. It was more graceful
and fluent, revealing a perfect, harmonious and unconscious command of
his whole body.
As he walked, he stared about him restlessly; but nothing that he saw
disturbed the immobility of his face until he reached the triumphal arch
at Madison Square. He gazed at this for some time with a most unpleasant
expression indeed, then approached it more closely and read the immortal
village names inscribed upon it.
“Oh, damn!” he said, and, walking quickly to the nearest subway station,
took a train for Harlem.
Same dingy apartment house, looking a little dingier after five years,
same dark elevator, same stuffy hall; and here came Phil and Catherine
running down it to meet him. Their eagerness touched Stacey. He did not
himself feel eager, though he was glad to see them.
“Well!” cried Phil. “Well! Now how—now what—I mean, what _can_ a
fellow say in these circumstances? Come along! Come on in! Hurry up
about it!”
And: “We’re so glad!” said Catherine.
They pushed him into their flat, through the dining-room, into the
sitting-room, and plumped him down in an easy chair. A table stood
beside it, with a pitcher and glasses. Ice tinkled as the table was
jostled.
“Sauterne cup,” Phil explained breathlessly. “‘Gather ye rose-buds’ and
so forth. Only a short time left, you know. Sole subject of conversation
in our great republic. Here! Drink! ‘Drink for your altars and your
fires!’ I mean to say: ‘Drink, for once dead you never—’ oh, no, that
isn’t it!” And he broke out laughing.
Catherine was calmer, or anyway more static. She had sat down on an
ottoman, elbows on knees, chin in hands, and was gazing up at Stacey.
But her face, too, glowed with pleasure.
Stacey was smiling faintly. He looked from one to the other and said to
himself that they were both just the same as four and a half years
since, for all that Phil looked older and more worn and even a little
thinner.
“You’re both awfully good to me,” he said.
“We’re awfully noisy!” exclaimed Phil remorsefully, sitting down. “We
forget that you’re tired.”
Stacey lit a cigarette. “I’m not tired, Phil,” he remarked. “I never get
tired nowadays. Nothing like military service for keeping one fit, you
know,” he added drily. “And I’m gladder to see both of you than any
other two people in the world.” He spoke with an effort. “You both all
right? Everything going well? The children?”
“Out at their aunt’s house in the country,” replied Philip, a look of
perplexity coming over his face.
There was a pause.
Then suddenly Catherine spoke, haltingly, with the way she had of being
unused to words, but earnestly. “What does it—do to a man, Stacey? As
much as—all that?”
He sighed in relief. “Wipes him out, Catherine,” he replied in an
emotionless voice. “Replaces him with some one else. Good thing that you
saw. Because I couldn’t possibly keep up the bluff. I can’t pretend with
you two.”
“Nor with any one else,” said Catherine.
“Nor with any one else.”
Philip laughed. “Well, then,” he declared, “we have with us to-day a
brand-new friend!”
But Catherine was clearly going to have things over and done with. “You
mean,” she said courageously, “that you’re—glad, a little—to see us,
but not—”
“Not the way I ought to be. Only in a vague uneasy dead way. Rotten,
isn’t it? And brutal. And bound to hurt your feelings. But what can you
expect? If I were to see a man cut in two by a bus on the Avenue I
shouldn’t feel anything at all except a little distaste. There you have
it. Pretty, isn’t it?”
“But the truth,” said Catherine, her eyes shining.
“Yes,” Stacey admitted. “There’s that to be said for it.”
Philip Blair tugged at his short blond moustache and stared at his
friend wistfully. “You don’t hurt me, Stacey,” he said at last. “And
it’s not true that you’re not fond of us. If it were true you wouldn’t
have been so honest. How do I know what they’ve done to you? You’re
all—seared over. Had to be, I suppose, or die. You’ll come back to us.
Now tell us about all the outside things. First with the English.”
“I was with them, first as an N. C. O., then as a lieutenant, up to
June, 1917. Then I transferred to our—”
“Hold on! Hold on! You got the D. S. O. How?”
“Yes, the D. S. O. On the Somme, at Bazentin-le-Grand, for going out
with ten men and cleaning up a machine-gun nest. I transferred—”
“Damn it all!” said Phil, “is that the best you can do with it? How did
you do it?”
Stacey shook his head impatiently. “And then,” he went on, “as I said, I
transferred to the American army and was made a captain. And I got the
D. S. C. ‘for cool leadership and conspicuous bravery in action.’”
A sudden change came over Stacey’s face. It woke, as it were, to
life—but to sinister life.
“I’ll tell you about _that_,” he said in a vibrant passionate voice. “I
got the D. S. C. for carrying out an order that was sheer murder, for
leading my company in a frontal attack against a perfectly worthless
position over ground rotten with machine-guns. Not half of my men got
off clear. A perfectly worthless position, I tell you, that we retired
from next day because it wasn’t possible to hold and wouldn’t have done
us any good if we could have held it.”
Well, there was capacity for emotion left in Stacey,—that was clear.
Any one’s first impression of him would have been wrong. The question
was—capacity for what emotion? A fierce chill intensity glowed in, or
perhaps behind, his face. It died down as swiftly as it had kindled.
“What a—what a ghastly blunder!” Philip Blair murmured.
Catherine said nothing.
“That’s what war is,” Stacey replied. “One blunder after another. The
side which makes the most blunders loses. A trite thought, but true.”
“Then the Germans made the most?”
“Oh, by far!”
“Strange! For a while they seemed invincible—machine-perfect.”
Stacey lit a fresh cigarette. “It was the legend they threw out. They
might have won perhaps if they hadn’t grown to believe in it
themselves,” he remarked, almost indifferently.
He laid his cigarette down suddenly and smiled. “Come!” he said, with a
hard cheerfulness, “I’ll tell you about something pleasant—the reason
I’m here only now, the reason I didn’t get my ‘majority,’ the reason
they packed me off to Italy after the Armistice, the one thing I ‘did in
the Great War’ that I’ll tell my son about. It was in the Argonne, and I
was in command of a battalion—had been for a long time. We were in a
fairly isolated position. You know what the Argonne was—woods, lightly
held as to numbers by the enemy, careful, oh, so careful, machine-gun
nests everywhere! We’d had terrible losses but had plugged on through,
little by little. Paused at last. Sat still for about a week. Being
bombarded in a desultory fashion, but comfortable enough—comparatively.
This was November. Well, on November tenth, in the morning, I learned
something that I hadn’t any business to learn,—that the Armistice was
coming absolutely. On November tenth at four P.M. I received orders to
attack the position in front of us—sweet little hill, picture-puzzle of
machine-guns—at five A.M. the next morning, November eleventh—November
eleventh! Well, I didn’t do it.”
Stacey’s smile disappeared, and his face took on again that intensity
that seemed to reveal the presence within him of some single dark
absorbing passion.
“Think of it!” he said. “The cold-blooded futile murder in such
orders—given why? How should I know? Because Headquarters didn’t care
about going through the red tape of changing their prearranged plans, I
suppose. Anyhow,” he concluded, “I didn’t obey. I stood out for once
against the machine.”
“What did they do to you when they found out?” and: “Did the soldiers
under you know?” cried Phil and Catherine simultaneously.
“Can’t say as to my men. My lieutenants knew. They’d never have split on
me. But of course I was found out. There we still were, you see, after
the Armistice, which came that very day, in the same position as before.
My colonel, a decent fellow for a Regular Army officer, did the least he
could under the circumstances—relieved me of my command and sent me as
liaison officer to Italy, one being called for about then. Whole thing
very quiet. No fuss made. I should think not! Wouldn’t I have loved a
fuss? But the fact remains,” he said, “that, having set out to ‘make the
world a better place to live in’ (wasn’t that the way my departure was
explained?—not at the time, of course; then we were to ‘keep our minds
neutral’—but posthumously, after three years) I return, having made it
a place, of no matter what sort, for a hundred young men or so still to
be alive in. They’d have been rotting in neat little graves but for me.
And that’s all. I got demobilized over there—eventually—in Italy, and
came back, a free man in spite of the uniform, on the ‘Dante.’ And here
I am.”
He leaned back and lit still another cigarette.
“And do you know what people are going to say to you?” asked Catherine
in an odd voice. “They’re going to say: ‘Stacey, you smoke too much.’”
Suddenly she buried her head in her hands and burst out sobbing.
Both men started, and Philip half rose, then sat down again, pulling his
moustache and considering her helplessly. Stacey gazed at her with a
kind of grim sadness, as if from an immense distance.
“Forgive me!” she said at last, controlling herself and wiping her eyes.
“It—it isn’t because you’re bitter, Stacey,” she went on wearily after
a moment, choosing her words with difficulty, “and, oh, not at all
because you feel—burned out and unaffectionate. It’s—Phil, you tell
him. I can’t talk.”
“It’s because Catherine is tired,” said Phil simply. “With all that
you’ve been through, it would be too much to ask you to sympathize with
what she’s been through. But, infinitely less than your experience,
that’s been a lot, too. She always looked at things squarely—more
squarely than I. And what are you going to do when the truth you’re
seeking comes marching at you with great steps from a long way off and
shows itself a bleak brutal thing?”
Stacey gazed at his friend with intellectual sympathy at least.
Phil went on slowly. “We believed in the war, too. Perhaps not quite so
ardently as you, but we believed in it. It seemed, in the big
essentials, right against wrong. We were told—oh, you know all the
things we were told, the dreams we lived on!”
“I know,” said Stacey.
“All to end in this,—this bitter merciless peace, with all the seeds of
new wars in it!”
“Well,” asked Stacey, “when you saw the futile pettiness that revealed
itself in men, and the pomposity, and the selfishness, and the
greed”—he spat the word out—“did you expect anything better?”
“Not after a while, no,” Phil replied steadily. “At first I did. When I
saw the heroism. What happened to the war? A great wrong _was_ done.
Hundreds of thousands of you went to war nobly to right it. Belgium
_was_ invaded, wasn’t it?”
“I don’t remember,” said Stacey. “I suppose so. You touched the truth
when you said we ‘went to war.’ What did we go to? Suppose one ant
massacred another and you arranged an earthquake to punish it. That’s
what happened. You see, a time came,” he continued slowly, an odd dazed
look in his eyes,—“about 1916 it began, I should think—when all the
surface seemed to have been stripped from life, one layer after another,
until there was nothing left showing but universal naked pain. Nothing
mattered except this. It was so much bigger than anything else. Belgium
didn’t matter. Prussian militarism was a word. Love and hate
disappeared, unimportant. Nothing was left but pain.”
Catherine drew a long breath. “And then?” she murmured.
“And then,” he returned, “you went on existing somehow, impersonally,
without any emotions—”
“Are you sure?” Phil broke in.
“And without one tattered shred of an illusion left. I made up a story
about it once—it must have been in 1916. Imagine a man who has always
lived in a house with a roof of beautiful stained glass, and who revels
in the soft colors that shine through. One day a tremendous hail storm
comes and shatters the glass to fragments and lets the bleak white
daylight pour in. Well, at first the man is heart-broken. But, after a
little, he thinks: ‘Anyway this is truth. This is _real_ light. I’ve
been living falsely.’ So he bends down to the marble floor to see what
has done the damage, but all that he can find is a little pool of dirty
water.”
Philip and Catherine stared at Stacey.
The latter shook his head impatiently. “But that’s all past,” he said
coolly. “That was 1916. I give you my word that I don’t think about
myself at all any more. It’s an effort, trying to. I haven’t any
thoughts, and I don’t care a rap for any one, and there isn’t anything I
want to do, but I’m jolly well not going to do anything I _don’t_ want
to do. So that’s that!”
Catherine rose. She seemed quite her calm self again. She even smiled.
And there was only a slight unsteadiness in her voice when she spoke.
“Oh, no, it isn’t, Stacey!” she said. “You don’t want to stay to dinner
with us, but you’re going to, all the same.”
He laughed. “All right,” he assented.