Stacey threw himself into work with a cold vigor that had in it nothing
of fad or impulse. He did not find, as he had feared he might, that he
had forgotten much. Everything came back to him at once; it had all been
there, tucked away, neglected, within him. Neither did he chafe at the
long regular hours he kept, nor feel them burdensome. In the old days he
had perhaps been a little lazy; it had been hard for him on arriving at
the office not to waste time—over a newspaper or a book-catalogue or
anything that presented itself—before actually beginning his work; he
had crept into work as a swimmer into cold water. Now there was no
indolence about him; the instant he sat down at his desk he turned his
mind on the problems before him; and, swiftly, intelligently, with
intense concentration, he was soon accomplishing twice as much as any
other man in the office. Indeed, less from a desire to be always busy
than from a kind of impatient thoroughness, dislike of slovenliness, he
often spent hours on drawings that he might have turned over to
draftsmen. But, though he was extremely interested in his work, there
was no such zest in it for him as he had once felt. Formerly he had
romanticized it, had seen it all as something glowing and fine. Now it
was only rarely that he experienced a little lifting sense of
loveliness. This was when loveliness was really there to perceive.
Mr. Parkins, who was something of a dreamer and himself inclined to
waste time, was amazed. He had difficulty in supplying Stacey with
enough to do.
“Look here!” he said, before Stacey had been back a month. “What the
devil’s come over you? You’re insatiable! You turn the work out as
though it were arithmetic.” And he smiled in his uncertain reflective
way.
“So it is, nine-tenths of it,—as unemotional as arithmetic. Nothing but
concentration needed most of the time. Restful. A mistake to use your
soul when you don’t have to.”
The architect sat down on the edge of Stacey’s desk. “But,” he suggested
tentatively, “you don’t feel your old delight in it? Or do you?”
“When there’s any occasion,” said Stacey. “There, for instance.” And he
pulled from a mass of papers a drawing of a detail—a wrought-iron
balcony for a window. His eyes showed pleasure.
“Yes. By Jove, yes! That is good Stacey! Fine and—sure at the same
time. You’re better than you used to be. For Henderson’s house? Pity
it’s so sort of wasted. I mean, that it won’t be appreciated.”
“Oh, I don’t feel that,” Stacey replied. “I feel that it’s worth while
enough to do anything good, even a molding for a room,—I don’t know
why.”
Mr. Parkins looked surprised. “Well, that’s the right way to feel, of
course. There’s one thing certain,” he added, getting up. “You go into
the firm the first of the month. And there’s no favoritism about that,
either.”
“All right,” said Stacey. “Thanks. It’s awfully good of you.” And he
went to work again.
What Mr. Parkins had said was true. Stacey was a better architect than
formerly. He was still affectionately interested in detail, because that
interest had always been a part of him, and he knew enough now to
understand calmly that nothing in one ever vanished; but he saw things
in a larger, more solid way than once.
Hammond, a younger man who was put under Stacey’s guidance, questioned
him about Stacey’s preliminary sketch for a competition. It was of a
great stone bridge that was to cross both branches of the river in the
heart of the railway and warehouse section.
“Don’t you think it’s maybe a little—oh, well, grim, Carroll?” asked
Hammond, puzzled.
“Good Lord! man,” said Stacey, “think where it is—mud, noise,
confusion!”
“Well, that’s just it. Oughtn’t one to brighten the place up a little?”
Stacey shook his head. “I’m no damned beauty-doctor. Just the facts—the
right ones—in the best way.”
Stacey played tennis hard for an hour every afternoon when he had
finished work; for his strong body craved exercise. But his mind did not
crave companionship. He mingled with only a few people, and most of
these doubtless resented his manner as seeming hard and cold. In this
they were wrong. Stacey was merely aloof. He was not superior, judging
these people adversely; he was simply not letting them in—or himself
into them. He had a feeling that this world of personal relationships
was too rich. It was more like a sea. One might be swept away futilely
on it. Toward those whom he did admit as companions—and they were
sometimes the unlikeliest people—he was prodigal of interest, in his
own different way as altruistic as Mrs. Latimer.
For his hasty luncheon Stacey frequented a small cheap restaurant
near-by. So, also, did Jack Edwards, who had been commander of the local
American Legion post at the time Stacey had set it in a turmoil, but was
so no longer, having been succeeded by some one less incongruously
radical. The two fell into the habit of sitting down at table together
for their fifteen-minute meal, and Stacey found himself at once
attracted by the other man. Something in his firm lined face—perhaps
the odd expression of the brown eyes—hinted at a tortured courageous
personality. Stacey was friendly from the first. Edwards, on the other
hand, was in the beginning obviously suspicious. But he thawed
gradually, and the two became friends, united by some deep, almost
unrecognized resemblance between them. Yet for a long time their talk
was hardly more than casual comment on events.
“What do you do after lunch?” asked Stacey one June day, as they pushed
back their chairs and rose. “You must surely take more time off than
this before going back to work.”
“Oh,” the other replied, “I generally stroll around for twenty
minutes—down to the river sometimes.”
“Come up to my office and smoke a cigarette, won’t you? There’ll be no
one there for half an hour yet.”
“Don’t care if I do.” And the two men paid their checks and went out
together, Stacey walking slowly, since Edwards limped badly on account
of his wounded leg.
In Stacey’s room they sat down, with the littered desk between them, and
smoked silently for some minutes. Stacey had his feet up against the
side of an open drawer, but suddenly he swung them down and turned to
face his friend.
“Edwards,” he demanded abruptly, “what do you think of the war, anyway?”
The muscles of the other man’s rather stern face contracted slightly.
“Think of it?” he returned. “I don’t think of it. I don’t want to. Once
in a while I dream.”
Stacey considered him with grim comprehension. From almost any one else
the remark would have sounded melodramatic. Edwards made it quite
sincerely, with no thought of effect. When the raw black-and-white stuff
of melodrama became truth—that was horrible. Stacey shivered. But after
a little he returned to it. “Yes, but I mean: _do_ you feel now that it
was _all_ bad, all rotten selfish commercialism from the very beginning?
Oh, you’ve every right to! I don’t blame you and your people if you do.
But _do_ you?”
“We’ve been tricked,” Edwards replied bitterly, “duped! And I’ll take
that point of view—the one you ask me if I have—publicly as long as I
live. It’s the only way for me and mine to fight you and yours. Just as
the way for your side to fight is to assert that the war was noble.
But—it’s not so simple. No, I don’t think that.”
“No more do I!” cried Stacey. “I hate the war! It brought out everything
rotten that lay hidden in men. But—some hundreds of thousands of young
men did go into it nobly, and to just that extent it was a decent war.
They’re mostly dead now—worse luck to the world!—and a good many of
those that aren’t are turned beastly by what they lived through. But
. . .” He paused. A kind of dark light smoldered in his eyes.
“There was courage,” said Edwards in a deep voice. “My God! there was
courage! Not your romantic high-adventure sort, but the sort that could
live through mud and intensive shelling and still push men on,
afterward, to advance. But, oh, Christ! the wasted lives in the
Argonne!—thrown away through sheer incompetence! _Your_ people did
that!”
“And even so,” said Stacey somberly, “you didn’t see the Somme.”
Suddenly the dull glow in his eyes rose to a flame. He struck the desk
with his clenched fist. “The thing that gets me, Edwards,” he burst out,
“is these beastly cheap editors of weeklies sitting up and writing
pertly about the war as if it had been all a game of grab, nothing
decent! Damn them! Petty complacent asses! What do they know about it?
What do they know about physical courage—or any other kind? Have _they_
suffered? Have _they_ fought for ideals and been given dung? The
Intellectuals, they call themselves! An honest protester like Debs, all
right, I’ll respect him. But these vulgar underbred egotists—faugh! The
only ones I hate as much are the others who sit up and write about how
everything was first-rate—bully war—noble—good clearly coming out of
it!” He ceased, panting with rage.
“Don’t hate so, Carroll,” said Edwards slowly. “Where’s the good?”
Stacey drew his hand across his forehead. “You’re right,” he returned.
“It’s idiotic! I thought I’d learned better. And,” he added, laughing
shortly, “fancy wasting emotion on that tribe!”
He felt dizzy and faintly nauseated, as though poisoned, and he was
rather ashamed. It was a flash out of an earlier side of him.
For Stacey was like a fabric that was being woven together steadily out
of varied strands. But here and there the woof was faulty; the pattern
was broken; threads stuck out loosely.
But moments of hate such as this were rare. Generally he was cool
enough—cooler and perhaps more tolerant than Edwards, who always in
general talk showed himself bitterly conscious of the “class struggle.”
Edwards came up to the office for a few minutes after luncheon nearly
every day now, and as long as the two men talked personally or of
concrete subjects he forgot his obsession—or, rather, seemed almost
irately unable to apply it in any way to Stacey; but at the least
broadening of the conversation it emerged, a sullen thing.
“Come out to dinner with us some evening, will you? To-night, if you
like,” Stacey suggested once.
“No,” said Edwards shortly.
Stacey laughed. “Why not? Bound to have no dealings with the devil or
any of his allies? Better come. You’d like my father. You’d fight with
him, but you’d like him.”
“I don’t want to,” said Edwards. “I don’t want to like any of your crew.
It’s their likableness that I resent. Of course they’re likable. Why
shouldn’t they be? They’ve leisure and all the appurtenances essential
to becoming so. We’ve got to fight them—you, as class against class.”
“I see. Sentiment must be kept out. No fraternizing in the trenches.”
Edwards flushed. “You’re too rotten clever, Carroll,” he replied
resentfully. “It’s easy for you to make me appear in the wrong.”
“No,” said Stacey, “I simply fancy you’re wrong to think in classes.
They’re abstractions. If everybody would drop them men could meet as
men.”
“Oh,” exclaimed Edwards, clearly out of patience, “it’s all very well
for you to sit there and talk! You can afford to be sweetly reasonable.
You’re fixed—safe. You’ve everything. Of course you can talk
unselfishly; you can even talk like a revolutionary. You know damn well
there isn’t going to be any revolution—not yet.”
“Well, as for that,” said Stacey mildly, “I’ll admit that I live in a
luxurious house with all sorts of comforts—pleasant enough in their
way. Only how much do they amount to? I’m not essentially soft. I go on
inhabiting the place because it’s there, because I haven’t any
particular social theories (I don’t, for instance, see what good my not
living there would do any one), because of my father, and because of
Catherine Blair, my friend Phil’s widow, and her boys.”
Edwards’ face was crimson. “I didn’t mean what I said, Carroll,” he
blurted out. “I know well enough that—oh, well, I apologize.”
“Shucks!” said Stacey, “that’s all right. It’s a good thing to look into
one’s own existence now and then. For the rest, I dare say that I’m paid
more than I’m worth for my work here. I can’t tell, and I don’t intend
to waste much time worrying about it. I probably earn more than a
skilled mechanic like you, and that’s wrong. I earn less than a broker,
and that’s wrong. I can, because of my aptitude and a long training,
build decent houses. How’s any one to know what my exact remuneration
should be?”
“Under this system the Lord God Himself couldn’t decide.”
“That’s what I mean—under this system.”
Stacey was engrossed with the plans for the bridge one afternoon when
the office-boy poked his head in at the door.
“Lady to see you, Mr. Carroll,” he announced.
“All right,” said Stacey mechanically, not taking it in.
So when a moment later he looked up to see Irene Loeffler standing
opposite him he fairly gaped with surprise. But he rose quickly and went
around the desk to her.
“How are you?” he said. “I didn’t hear you come in. Sit down, do! It’s a
long time since I’ve seen you.”
She shook hands, dropped his hand quickly, then flung herself into a
chair. She was the same abrupt disconcerting person as ever. Just now
she was a trifle flushed with embarrassment.
Stacey sat down near her—but not too near—and considered her with a
polite external gravity. Inwardly he was amused by the recollection of
her advances, somewhat remorseful at having treated her so roughly, and
just a little apprehensive.
“Wanted to see you, Mr. Carroll,” Irene began gruffly, “and this seemed
a good place. Sorry to disturb you, though.”
But there was a faint tremor in her voice. Her affectation of
mannishness made her appear only the more feminine, Stacey thought. In
an odd way she was attractive.
“Not a bit of it! I’m glad to see you,” he replied, and waited.
Irene swallowed once or twice. “Well,” she said, trying again for a
beginning, “I wanted to tell you something. I suppose you’ve got a
rotten opinion of me. Haven’t you?” she demanded, staring at him, a
sulky childish look about her mouth.
Stacey cordially disclaimed having anything of the sort.
“Well, you’d have a right to, I guess. Anyway, what I wanted to tell you
was that I’ve come to my senses. You haven’t anything to fear from me
any more.”
Stacey choked at this and kept his face straight with difficulty.
“And I’m engaged to be married to Paul Hemingway. Know him?”
“Fine!” said Stacey, laughing in spite of his best efforts. “Awfully
good fellow! I think you’ve chosen well. I’ll send you a wedding
present.” And he held out his hand.
But she did not take it. Instead she twisted her handkerchief nervously
around her fingers. Stacey had never seen any one with so little repose.
“Do you think,” she demanded abruptly, “that it’s all right for me to
marry him?”
He stared at her. “Why, what do you mean?” he asked, completely lost.
“Well, I mean,” she said sullenly, her lower lip quivering like that of
a child about to cry, “I mean—after what I said to you.”
Stacey understood now and was touched. “Why, you silly child!” he
exclaimed, “I never heard of anything so absurd! If that’s the worst
thing you ever did you’ve the purest past in the world!”
She brightened, tears of relief standing in her eyes. “But anyway I must
tell Paul about it, mustn’t I?”
“No!” Stacey almost shouted, overcome with a mixture of amazement and
admiration. “There’s nothing to tell!”
Irene wiped her eyes, in obvious resentment at the need. “All right,
then,” she said. “Thanks.” And now she shook hands. Then she looked at
Stacey with a tremulous smile. “You’ve got a lot of charm,” she
announced.
But at this he retreated hastily behind his desk, and she departed,
laughing.
Stacey thought often of Marian, but he did not see her until July. He
had left the office late one afternoon and was walking briskly along the
boulevard on the way to the tennis courts when she called to him from
her open car. It drew up at the curb beside him, and Marian reached out
her hand to him gracefully. She was coming from a tea, she said, and she
was wearing a lacy dress of blue and silver and a drooping picture-hat,
white and transparent, that cast soft shadow over her face without
really obscuring it. Against the deep cushions of the tonneau she looked
small, elegant and sophisticated. It occurred to Stacey that it was
nonsense for him to be concerned about her. Their meeting must have
appeared to an outsider like one of those Salon pictures of an encounter
in the Bois de Boulogne.
“You’re looking very well, Stacey,” she said gaily, “but you don’t
deserve to have me say so. Here you’ve been back for two months without
coming near me! It’s not respectful.”
Stacey laughed. “What a funny word! Well, I will come. Love to.”
Marian’s arm hung limply along the edge of the car. She drummed idly
with her hand against the polished enamel. And the gesture seemed to sum
her up—perfection, graceful ennui, and all.
“Oh,” she said, “you’ll just say you’ll come, and that will be the end
of it unless I pin you down. So I will. Come—let’s see!—come on Monday
at five and have tea with me.”
“All right. Thanks. I’ll be coming straight from the office, so I’ll
look dingy probably. Hope you won’t mind.”
“Gracious, no!” she replied, apparently without malice, and laughing
rather delightfully. “It’s not your clothes I care about seeing. I’ve
_got_ clothes. Till Monday, then.” She touched the chauffeur’s back
lightly with the tip of her slender blue-and-white parasol, and the car
moved away smoothly.
He gazed after her for a moment, and again he dubbed himself a fussy
fool. He forgot that one’s thought of a person is direct, without veils;
so that in an actual encounter after long separation one is aware
chiefly of the veils.
But it was only his father and Catherine whom Stacey saw constantly. He
spent nearly all his evenings at home. Sometimes he would read or would
merely look on while Catherine and Mr. Carroll played cards. And he was
amused at this; for he did not think that Catherine liked cards really.
When he thought she had endured enough he would insist on playing in her
stead, declaring that she was usurping his place in the home. Or, again,
they would all three merely sit and talk. But this made Mr. Carroll
restless. He demanded, Stacey could see, some direct problem, even if a
small one, to occupy his mind. He could talk while he played cards, but
talk was for him no end in itself; it was a pleasant accompaniment to
something else that led somewhere.
On other evenings, when Mr. Carroll must speak at a banquet or welcome
some visiting potentate of the Republican Party (Mr. Harding was
nominated by now, and Mr. Carroll, at first disappointed, soon perceived
that the choice was a wise one), Stacey would sit with Catherine or,
more often, walk with her in the garden.
He felt that he did not know Catherine at all, and he was aware that
this was partly his fault. He had always thought of her as Phil’s wife,
and she still evoked for him the memory of Phil rather than any clear
image of her own. Yet, though he could not have said what she was like,
he admired her more than any one else he knew. It was no good to ask
himself why. He could say vaguely that she was clear and cool as deep
water . . . that she had a profound truthfulness . . . that there was a
quality of Fact in her:—what did all that mean? Only once had her
personality touched his in a flash,—on that afternoon when she had
pleaded with him—but commandingly almost, if gently—not to go to
Marian, and he had cut her with cruel words because he had yielded. He
bit his lip in shame at the thought.
And she was so shy, so immensely reserved. She was not really at her
ease with him, he saw, except when the boys were present or his father.
She would talk about herself, when Stacey questioned her, as though she
were talking of some one else.
“What do you do with your day, Catherine?” he asked once. “I mean, when
the boys are away at school.”
This seemed to startle her, rather. “I—I write, or try to, regularly,
Stacey,” she replied, after a moment.
They were walking in the garden, and he paused suddenly to stare at her.
“You mean—things to publish?” he cried, amazed.
“Yes. Does it seem incredible? I suppose it does,” she returned simply.
“No! No! I don’t mean that! I should think you probably had more to say
than any one else I know, only—pardon me, Catherine!—oh, well, let’s
be frank!—expression isn’t your forte.”
She laughed shyly at this. “It’s easier when you write,” she said.
“Yes, of course it must be. What kind of things?”
“Little articles,” she replied haltingly. “Mostly for English papers.
It’s hard to get them accepted here. One or two places—do—sometimes.”
“You’ll let me see them? Please!”
“Never!” she exclaimed, horrified. “And I don’t sign my own name, so
it’s useless to look.”
“You’re exasperating, Catherine!” he cried, and meant it. Then he
laughed suddenly. “I’ll bet they’re radical—oh, radical! Tell me,
Catherine,” he added maliciously, “when you’ve gone upstairs after my
father has talked about Bolshevism at some length, do you sit down then
and write your subversive stuff? A double life—that’s what you’re
leading!”
She flushed at this and would say no more.
Yet Stacey’s persistent attempt to get at Catherine was not the result
of mere curiosity, even the curiosity of affection. At heart he felt
vaguely that she was immensely lonely in her isolation, in great need of
sharing her grief for Phil with some one else. He would have her make
such a friend of him as Phil had made him.