“Dear Phil: It has occurred to me that under present building conditions you might be having rather a struggle of it on your own in New York. I’m writing to know whether you would consider coming out here for a time—or permanently, if you can stand the place. I think I could find you a job with my old firm. You’d be a great acquisition for them, you’d bring a little more vulgarity into our—what’s the word?—etiolated architecture, and you could live through this difficult and expensive period without worrying about how to make both ends meet. Of course I know what your independence means to you, and I may be all wrong in assuming that you would consider abandoning it temporarily; but I figure that when the difficulty of existence passes a certain mark it becomes absorbing to the point of destroying most of one’s real life, and that this mark is pretty sure to be passed by any young man trying to be an architect on his own in New York City to-day.“I’ll add a postscript to-morrow morning after I’ve seen Parkins (the head of my firm).“Good night.“Yours,“Stacey.”
“Dear Phil: It has occurred to me that under present building conditions you might be having rather a struggle of it on your own in New York. I’m writing to know whether you would consider coming out here for a time—or permanently, if you can stand the place. I think I could find you a job with my old firm. You’d be a great acquisition for them, you’d bring a little more vulgarity into our—what’s the word?—etiolated architecture, and you could live through this difficult and expensive period without worrying about how to make both ends meet. Of course I know what your independence means to you, and I may be all wrong in assuming that you would consider abandoning it temporarily; but I figure that when the difficulty of existence passes a certain mark it becomes absorbing to the point of destroying most of one’s real life, and that this mark is pretty sure to be passed by any young man trying to be an architect on his own in New York City to-day.
“I’ll add a postscript to-morrow morning after I’ve seen Parkins (the head of my firm).
“Good night.
“Yours,
“Stacey.”
Stacey glanced the letter through swiftly, folded and addressed it, and laid it on the desk.
Then he went to bed and fell asleep at once.
Waking early the next morning he did not lie still through those moments of delicious indolence in which most men indulge themselves, but slipped out of bed immediately and into his cold bath.
His body responded to the shock glowingly. It was magnificently fit. The muscles of his back and abdomen rippled smoothly as he rubbed himself with the rough towel. One would justly have admired Stacey as a healthy handsome animal. And it may be that his obstinate distaste for speculation, his barely conscious, undeliberate desire to avoid thought, arose out of his animal instinct of self-preservation, was but the deep determination not to allow his strong sane body to be affected by his sick and twisted mind.
He took from the closet a pre-war suit of his, a soft gray, civilian suit, and in regarding it felt a keener joy than he had felt in stepping off the steamer or in seeing Phil and Catherine or in drinking champagne last evening—a keener joy, alas, than he felt when he had donned the clothes; for they did not seem natural and easy to his militarized body.
Then he went downstairs and out of doors into the well-kept garden. It was still only seven o’clock and nobody was about—not even his father, who was an early riser.
But Mr. Carroll did presently appear. “Well, youarechanged, Stacey!” he called jovially, as he drew near through the tall rose bushes. “Seems to me I remember the time when for you to get down to eight o’clock breakfast was—hello!” And he surveyed his son critically. “Back in civilian clothes already, eh?” he observed meditatively. “Well, that’s right, I suppose. Youarea civilian again, of course. And I don’t think much of these lads who go flaunting their uniforms about for months after they’re out of the service, determined to wring the last drop of credit from their performance of duty. Still . . .” He paused. “Well,” he concluded cheerfully, “there’s one thing. You can put on all the civilian clothes you like, but nobody with half an eye would be deceived. You don’t look like a civilian. You look like a soldier.”
“Damn it all!” said Stacey, exasperated, “I know I do.”
His father laughed. “Come on in to breakfast. Do you still eat that idiotic excuse for a meal you used to—coffee and two bites of a roll?”
“No,” said Stacey, “I eat bacon, eggs, fish—anything I get.”
“By Jove, youhaveimproved!” Mr. Carroll exclaimed, with another laugh.
After breakfast Stacey drove into town with his father, but left him at the door of the Carroll Building and walked briskly along the street until he came to the building in which Parkins and May, the architects with whom he had worked before the war, had their offices.
He was asked his business formally by the office-boy, new since his time, but waved him aside and opened the door of Mr. Parkins’s private room a little way.
“Yes?” said Mr. Parkins. “Oh, by the Lord! it’s Stacey Carroll! Come in! Come in!” he cried, rising and holding out his hand.
Stacey was pleased at the welcome. There exists between people who have worked hard together a camaraderie, approaching affection, but pleasanter since it makes no demands on expression. Stacey felt it for the men of his battalion; he had forgotten that he felt it for any one else. The rediscovery was a small pleasant surprise. He shook the architect’s hand cordially.
“Of course I saw by the paper this morning that you were back,” Mr. Parkins was saying, “but I’m blessed if I expected you to get around here to-day.”
“Thought I’d drop in,” said Stacey, collapsing lightly into a chair. “How are you?” And he scrutinized the older man’s shrewd clean-shaven face, which showed around the eyes little worried wrinkles, brought there by the perpetual endeavor to reconcile clients’ ideas with some modicum of architectural consistency.
“Pretty well! Pretty well!” Mr. Parkins replied. “These have been lean years, as you know. No building to speak of. But we’ve got all we can do again now and more too, even though the cost of material and labor is so high you’d think it would be prohibitive. But a good many people have made a good deal of money, and, after all, houses have got to be built. There aren’t enough to go round. We surely can use you, Stacey.”
“H’m!” said Stacey. “Sorry to disappoint you, but I’m out of the running for a while. Not coming back.”
“You’re not! Oh, now, look here! May and I talked it over and decided we’d offer you a junior partnership right off the bat, and now you—what’s wrong?”
“You’re awfully kind,” said Stacey, “but honestly I can’t—and I swear I don’t know why. I give you my word I couldn’t draw plans for a—bill-board at present.”
“Fiddlesticks!”
“Sorry!” Stacey remarked. “But that’s the way it is.” He smiled ironically. “All this returned-soldier-restlessness stuff, you know.”
Mr. Parkins considered him closely. “Now whathaveyou gone and done to yourself?” he observed at last. “Youlooklike Stacey Carroll, yet you don’t seem quite like him. I believe,” he added, with a laugh, “I really believe I’m half afraid of you. You’re a—”
“Little changeling, yes,” said Stacey, bored. “Now listen, Mr. Parkins,” he went on quickly. “There’s something I want to ask you to do for me. It’ll be a favor to me and a good turn to yourself at the same time.” And he stated Philip Blair’s case, without mentioning his name.
“Well,” said Mr. Parkins thoughtfully, “it might be done, of course. We’ll need a new man, since you’re not coming back for now—confound you! But what we need is a good safe man. Is your friend—what’s his name, by the way?”
“Philip Blair.”
Mr. Parkins uttered an exclamation. “Oh, I’ve seenhiswork!” he said. “Happened on a perfect wonder of a library he did in a small New York town. The villagers disliked it immensely. I asked about him afterward. He’s the real thing; but the idea of your recommending him to me as a safe man! It’s outrageous!”
“He’ll be as safe as you like,” Stacey insisted. “Five years of what he’s been trying to do would have crushed the danger out of an anarchist. Try him.”
“Well,” said Mr. Parkins, “I will. I’ll try him, because I think it’s a shame a man like that should be so hard pressed, but I know I’m making a mistake. You can write Blair that if he wants to come I’ll give him twenty-five hundred a year on a year’s trial.”
An odd spasm contracted Stacey’s features, but passed at once. “Oh, but I say,” he protested, in a dead emotionless voice, “you were giving me four thousand before the war!”
Mr. Parkins shook his head. “I’ll make it three thousand, but not a cent beyond,” he said firmly. “Philip Blair’s a genius. A genius isn’t worth more than three thousand to me.”
Stacey laughed. “I like the implication,” he observed.
So he added a postscript to his letter and sent it off to Phil.
At three-thirty precisely Stacey was at Marian’s house. He knew he had a problem to face, since it was unfortunately true that he had no love left for Marian and did not desire to marry either her or any one else. But he had no plan and he had not said to himself that he would not marry her. He had not said anything at all to himself. He merely went to her house as per schedule. All that he felt was a sense of something burdensome—and just a little faint curiosity. After all, he had loved this girl once upon a time. That was it. “Once upon a time” exactly expressed it. It was the way you began fairy-tales.
He was relieved, if so slender an emotion can be called relief, that it was not Marian who opened the door of the house to him. He had been a little afraid that Marian herself would welcome him with an impetuous rush. But the door was opened by a maid—and not even the one the Latimers had had in the old days, at which also Stacey somehow felt relief.
He went into the drawing-room, hoping to find Mrs. Latimer there; for, besides feeling that her presence would put off the demand for emotional moments, he really did want to see her. But she was not there. The room was empty.
He went over and stood with his back to the fire-place and looked around him, an odd smile drawing at one corner of his mouth. For again he was feeling the weak futile tug of old discarded emotions. These vases and chairs and statuettes, the whole familiar setting of the room, reminded him of what he had once felt in their presence; which is the same as saying: what he had once been. Stacey was like a boat floating on the water, almost solitary, almost loose, but not quite; still attached by a frayed cord or two to his old self.
But the portières at one end of the room were parted gently, and Marian stood between them.
Stacey caught the soft sound and saw her at once. But, as he gazed at her, he continued to smile the same smile.
Nevertheless, what he felt was mixed. He was straightforwardly contemptuous of her melodramatic behavior, unexpectedly struck by her fine beauty, and stirred uneasily by memories.
Well, that half pleasurable discomfort is all that most long-parted lovers truly feel on meeting again, no matter how earnestly in letters they may have lashed their old emotion to keep it awake. But, since, even though changed, they are still they, the discomfort readily grows again to love in the renewed proximity.
Not with Stacey. He was no longer Stacey Carroll, 1914. He was a different person. His discomfort faded, flickered and went out—all in the brief moment of silence.
“You certainly are beautiful, Marian,” he said appreciatively, but without moving.
“Well,” she returned, with a ripple of laughter, “I’m glad you still think so—and feel so sure of it.” She moved slowly forward a few steps, toward him.
His mind was quite clear now and working swiftly. He thought rapidly that five years ago this demeanor of Marian’s would have set his heart to throbbing with delight. He would have likened Marian to a shy, half tamed bird, fond yet afraid of being caught. What an idiot he had been! To-day he coldly found her behavior absurdly affected. All these little airs and graces! Fiddlesticks! But, far more strongly than admiration of Marian’s beauty and cool scorn of her coquetry, Stacey was feeling elation, because it was now obvious to him that she did not love him, probably had never loved him. Frank love would not accord with these mincing ways.
Yet with all this only a few seconds of silence elapsed.
Stacey crossed the room to a divan and threw himself down easily into one corner of it. “Come on over here, Marian,” he said comfortably.
She stood still and looked at him, half archly, half in a puzzled way. “Stacey, you are—you are the most ardent lover!” she exclaimed.
“And you!” he retorted calmly. “Let’s sit down and talk over our passion.”
Marian flushed and gave something like a pettish stamp of her small foot. “I won’t!” she cried.
“Then don’t!” he returned, with a laugh.
However, she seemed to think better of it, for she did come slowly to the couch and perched herself on the end opposite Stacey. She sat there gazing at him, one foot on the upholstery, elbow on knee, her small pointed chin resting in her cupped hand.
Stacey, still smiling, considered her. “You’re perfect like that,” he said sincerely. “Some Greek sculptor of the Fourth Century—no, the Third—ought to have carved you.”
“Stacey, don’t you love me any longer?” she asked softly.
“Do you love me?”
She started up. “You’re horrid!” she cried furiously. “Each time that I ask you a question you ask me one in return. I’ve waited for you—nearly five years—and this afternoon I looked forward to your coming and sent everybody out of the house, and then when you come you look at me as though I were anobjet d’artand laugh at me—laughcoldlyat me!”
“Not atyou, Marian,” he said quietly. “I couldn’t laugh at you. I find I don’t know you at all. Come! Forgive me for being rude. Let’s talk everything over soberly.”
She sat down again and looked at him hostilely. “I see now why you didn’t write oftener,” she said haughtily. “I thought it was because you were too busy. Fancy!”
“No, you don’t see,” he replied, “and it’s difficult for me to explain, because I don’t understand very well myself. Also the subject’s distasteful to me. But I owe it to you to try to explain.”
“I think you do,” she said icily.
He nodded, unimpressed by her tone. “It’s like this,” he went on, with an effort. “You’ve got to see me straight. And if I’m brutal, why, so much the better for you. I’m not only not the laurel-crowned knight of your flattering princess’s fancy. I’m not even the person I really was before I went away. Every bit of sweetness and light has been burned out of me. I don’t get delicate soft sensations out of anything any more. The overtones that you love don’t exist for me. Nothing has any glamour. All I can see in life is a mess of bare conflicting facts, stark naked.”
Stacey had forgotten Marian. His eyes glowed and there was a stern beauty in his face. Yet he was only leaning abhorrently over the upper edge of the well. He missed almost everything of importance.
While he spoke, the girl’s features had lost their expression of chill aloofness. Her lips were parted now, and she gazed at him as though fascinated.
“And if I tell you that I don’t love you,” he concluded fiercely, “I can honestly swear that it’s just that I don’t—can’t—love any one or anything. My saying so shouldn’t hurt anything but your pride, because you don’t love me, either.”
She leaned toward him ever so little. “How do you know I don’t love you?” she demanded softly.
“Because you create a setting, play a game, surround our meeting with little tricks,” he returned, quite unmoved by her coaxing grace.
She gazed at him intently, her breath coming and going rapidly. “Then you don’t—you truly don’t—even want to kiss me?” she asked.
He returned her gaze. Her coquetry did not stir him; her beauty did. “Yes,” he said somberly, “of course I do! But not because I find you shy and alluring. I don’t. Just because you’re beautiful and desire’s a fact.”
He seized her small wrists and drew her toward him slowly. She struggled fiercely at first, but then, when her face was close to his, yielded suddenly and returned his kiss.
“Nowdon’t you love me, Stacey?” she murmured.
“No!” he cried, releasing her. “Nor you me!”
She rose and smoothed her hair.
“You look precisely like a Tanagra,” he said admiringly.
“If you say anything more of that sort,” she burst out, “I shall hate you!”
“You’ll do that, anyway,” he replied.
She gazed at him strangely, an expression of cruelty in her fine mouth. “Ames Price has been imploring me—for two years now—to marry him,” she said slowly. “I think I’ll do it. Would you mind, Stacey?”
He winced. “Mind? Of course I’d mind! Animal jealousy, too, is a fact—nasty fact like all the rest of them! But go ahead and marry him if you’ll be happy with him.”
Her eyes shone for a moment with triumph. Then she laughed musically. “What a weird afternoon!” she observed, and pressed a bell in the wall. “Come! Let’s have tea. You’re quite Byronic, Stacey!”
Well, she was a sentimentalist, no doubt, but she was no fool, Stacey admitted to himself. Come to think of it, he was being Byronic in his intense antagonistic desire to stand alone, freed from all ties.
Mr. Latimer was talking, although it was early afternoon and therefore not his best hour.
“The supreme importance of the arts,” he said, “is poise. There is no poise in life itself. Life is mere tumult and shouting. And since there is no poise there is no meaning. The arts hover above the hurly-burly, dipping down into it a little for delicate nourishment, but no moreofit than a cloud, which sucks its constituent vapor from the earth, is of the earth. In the country of the arts there is quiet. That is to say,” he added drily, “there was. The arts at the moment have ceased to exist, and with them has vanished all that we possessed of value.”
“No doubt,” Stacey assented politely.
But the beautifully enunciated phrases really gave him a feeling of contempt for Mr. Latimer. And he wondered how he could ever have admired this polished esthete. His glance wandered to Marian (the only other person in the room, her mother being out somewhere) who was curled up in a large chair on the other side of her father. Stacey considered the girl’s face attentively. She stirred him by her beauty, especially when seen thus, motionless, carved; yet left him, when everything was summed up, feeling actively hostile.
Mr. Latimer had taken a small vase from the mantelshelf and was toying with it abstractedly.
“Leisure,” he remarked, “is anathema to Americans. Yet leisure is all there is of importance. It is what all men strive to attain through labor, but, having attained, are incapable of supporting. It is too noble for their tawdry energetic minds, and they hasten to fill it up with meaningless movement. They even, I am told, go to witness what they call ‘photo-plays,’ where, though themselves sitting still, they can enjoy a vicarious restlessness and be saved from the leisure they dread. How false an understanding of life, or, rather, what complete lack of any understanding! The goal of life itself is, after all, just the eternal leisure of the grave.”
“An admirable epigram,” said Stacey, with no hint of expression in his face. “I cannot make out whether it belongs spiritually in the eighteenth century or in the nineties of the last century.”
“In any case it does not belong in the twentieth,” Mr. Latimer returned, a touch of irascibility in his voice. “Nor do I.” He set the vase down almost with a bump. “I must go,” he said. “I have an appointment, and here in America every one is always on time.” And he left them.
Marian uncurled herself gracefully. “Papa is cross,” she observed, with a laugh. “It is only three o’clock, you see. He does not approve of early afternoon. Let’s go to the library, Stacey. I don’t like this room.” And she danced off up the stairs, he following.
She half knelt on a window-seat in the library and gazed out, her mood seeming to change suddenly from hard to soft.
“The clouds drift and drift,” she said dreamily. “And sometimes they’re majestic and white with purple shadows, as now, and sometimes they’re black and terrible, and sometimes mere little pale ghosts of clouds. But they’re always clouds. They haven’t anything to do with real majesty or terror or ghosts. (Can one say ‘real ghosts,’ Stacey?) Only clouds. They just drift and drift. I think I’d like to be a cloud.”
“Why shouldn’t you want to?” he observed callously, “It’s your father’s theory all over again.”
She whirled around, her face mischievous. “Oh, how funny you are, Stacey! Youwon’tcare for me any more. You’ll damn anything I do or say. You’re an enemy, out and out,—oh, yes, you are! Yet you’d be glad enough to kiss me this very minute.”
“Yes,” he admitted angrily.
“But you’re not going to,” she said, with haughtiness. “Not now or ever.” She smiled. “Ames Price is coming to see me to-night. Shall I let him kiss me? It would make him so happy. I think it’s my duty to. Come! Let’s sit down and talk of duty, Stacey.”
And so she kept it up, as full of witchery as Circe, dazzling in the bright rapid flash of her moods, swift and lovely as a swallow, soft at one moment and clouded,—brilliant and gemlike the next.
Yet, through it all, Stacey, though he talked freely enough, was cold, distant and bored. He was like a man idly watching a sorceress draw circles and pentagons in the sand and murmur incantations. No spirits responded. No enchantment ensued. It was merely laborious lines and words, silly child’s play. The only thing that interested him—a little—in the performance was the question of whether or not it was deliberate.
Stacey had continued to go daily to see Marian. He remained unmoved by almost everything in her that had formerly delighted him. There was no longer any magic, any mystery. Yet he desired to be near her. Something she did give him. But as to what it was he did not inquire.
It was a strange relationship, but it is possible that Marian found it piquant. She seemed fascinated by Stacey, now that he was indifferent to her.
At last the girl sank lightly down upon an ottoman near the young man’s feet and gazed up at him, as on that day years before when he had come to tell her he was going to the war.
“You’re the oddest person, Stacey!” she said, her eyes shining. “Just like a great rock—a handsome rock. Why do you come to see me? You don’t need to, you know. You’ve broken our engagement—and my heart,” she continued elfishly. “I shall tell every one that you have. It will be in the newspapers. ‘Returned Hero Breaks Girl’s Heart!’ ”
This was better. There was something cool and hard in this that appealed to Stacey, wakened a sense of surface comradeship in him.
“H’m!” he remarked, smiling. “Your heart seems to be doing pretty well—if you’ve got one.Haveyou got one, Marian?”
“That’s a horrid habit you’ve acquired, Stacey,” she said gaily, “of never answering a question, but always asking another. I asked you why you came to see me. Well, since you won’t tell me, I’ll tell you. You come to see me just as you’d go to see the Parthenon.”
The smile faded from his face. By Jove, she was right! (Stacey Carroll, 1914, had been intelligently introspective; Stacey Carroll, 1919, could always be surprised if some one told him truth about himself. Also annoyed, generally. But not this time.) Yes, that was it, he supposed. The bodily fact of Marian wakened his atrophied sense of beauty—but differently than in the old days, austerely save for the touch of desire.
“Now when you can see things as straight as that why do you go in so for everything rococo?” he demanded harshly. “Why do you embroider and sentimentalize?”
She gazed at him, her mouth compressed, her eyes brilliant with anger—which was certainly justified. Then her expression changed and she shrugged her shoulders, gracefully.
“So you see,” she said calmly, “you were just asking a silly careless question a moment ago. You don’t care whether I have a heart or not.” She smiled again. “What an odd pair we are!” she went on. “Poor me! Not engaged any longer! Deserted after all these years! You must be sure not to tell papa until you’ve given me time to get engaged to some one else—Ames Price, I think you said I might marry. Papa would be too awfully angry.”
“Why?” Stacey asked. “Is he so anxious to be rid of you?”
But at this Marian only laughed without replying.
Stacey had of course seen Mr. and Mrs. Latimer more than once by this time. His old admiration for Marian’s father had gone, like so many other things. He found Mr. Latimer a cultivated futile gentleman with an interest in baubles and a talent for intelligent monologue. The only thing about him that awakened any interest in Stacey was a kind of irascibility that Stacey did not remember as formerly characteristic of him. Mr. Latimer was really sharp at times, in a suave polished way, with his daughter and his wife.
But Mrs. Latimer, though she had certainly aged, had clearly not done so because of such trifles; for she bore her husband’s occasional pettish outbursts with a pleasant detached tolerance. They might have been the outbursts of characters in a book she was reading, for all the effect they appeared to have on her.
She had welcomed Stacey with quiet happiness, and he had felt at once a comfort in her presence which he felt in that of no one else. Yet she had said nothing of importance to him, had talked of externals even the time or two that they had found themselves alone together for a few minutes.
He left the Latimer house rather early on the afternoon of this unsatisfactory interview with Marian. Something about Marian antagonized him strongly, even now that he was surely free; so that the impulse he felt to seek her society repeatedly in this way revealed a bond of some inexplicable sort and irked him.
He walked swiftly north till he came to the handsome park the entrance to which lay at no great distance from the Latimer home. And, plunging into the green shady paths, he felt a sudden relief. To cut loose from it all—all streets! all men! To be free! There was no joy for him in the full-leafed June beauty of the trees or in the bird songs among them,—no call to comradeship. Quite otherwise. It was solely as release that he instinctively welcomed them.
Striding aimlessly onward in this mood, Stacey suddenly heard his name called and swung about quickly to see Mrs. Latimer sitting on a bench at the edge of the path he followed and waving a green parasol at him.
“I couldn’t help calling to you,” she said pleasantly, “though I oughtn’t to. You look so splendidly alone, as though you didn’t want to see any one.”
“Oh, but yes,” he returned, “I’m glad to see you! No one else; but you!” And he sat down on her bench.
“Now what old woman could help having her head turned by that?” she exclaimed, with a smile.
He scrutinized her face. Yes, she had grown older, he thought, but not ignominiously; in some way that made age seem of value. Even in regard to her Stacey was not curious as to what experiences of body or soul lay beneath the changes her face showed; but he accepted what she was, as a gracious fact.
“Where have you come from, Stacey?” she asked.
“From your house,” he replied, with an acid smile.
“Oh,” she observed, “so that’s why you were marching along with the air of being so glad to be alone! Have you broken—I mean, have you and Marian broken off your engagement?”
“Yes,” said Stacey coolly, “I believe so.”
After this they were silent for a while.
“Oh,” he observed suddenly, as an afterthought, but really with some little touch of human sentiment, “I hope you won’t feel hurt! I should be sorry to hurt you.”
“I?” Mrs. Latimer exclaimed. “Gracious, no! I’m immensely relieved. I wouldn’t have had you and Marian marry for anything in the world.”
Stacey did not know whether she was being a vixenish mother-in-law or an unnatural mother, but he found her remark amusing taken either way, and laughed. She laughed with him, but more gaily.
“Oh,” he added after a moment, “I forgot! Marian says we must be sure not to let Mr. Latimer know at present.”
“Of course not,” said Mrs. Latimer, as though it were too elementary a truth to deserve mention. “Marian’s much more intelligent than you ever gave her credit for being,” she added, an instant later.
“Yes, I know that,” Stacey admitted freely, even though he did not see the present application of the remark, or, indeed, why both Marian and her mother deemed it essential that Mr. Latimer should not learn that the engagement was off.
“Naturally,” said Mrs. Latimer thoughtfully, poking holes in the gravel with the tip of her parasol, “I could see that things were not the same as once. Well, that was to be expected. I shouldn’t have been at all surprised to have you show a kind of—of fond indifference to Marian. But what I don’t understand—there’s so much I don’t understand about you, Stacey—is the positive hostility I’ve felt sometimes in the looks you gave her. It was as though you hated her. Why? Poor Marian! She’s just the same as always. Is that itself—her sameness—the reason?”
“No,” Stacey muttered, “of course not! I don’t know why.”
“Can’t you—find out why?” she asked gently.
Stacey reflected, painfully and with resentment at the need. Finally he drew his hand across his forehead and looked at Mrs. Latimer. An odd fanatical intensity glowed in his face.
“I don’t know,” he said, speaking thickly and with difficulty. “I hadn’t thought. But perhaps it’s—because Marian’s perfection is so—dependent on wealth. I see Marian,” he went on, his words suddenly pouring out, “as a flower that you get by fairly watering the ground with money. Put her by herself in the panting sweating world and what would she be? Her grace is money! Her ease—money. All her charm—money! Everything in her except her chiselled Greek beauty is money! I hate money!” And he fell into tumultuous silence.
“Sothatwas it,” Mrs. Latimer said in a tired voice. “Poor Stacey! Confidence for confidence,” she added abruptly, after a pause. “Have you ever wondered why we gave up Italy and came here to live?”
“Often,” he answered, surprised. “I used to fancy it was your decision—your feeling that Marian ought to know America.”
She smiled oddly. “Mydecision! It would make no difference where Marian lived. She would never at any point touch the real world. No, it was not my decision. You see, our income, which was considered a tidy little competence at the time Mr. Latimer inherited it, remained stationary while the cost of everything grew and grew. America was expensive, but in it Marian could marry money—money, Stacey! And, of course,” she added, with a kind of bravado, “you were a splendidparti!”
Stacey felt sickened by the revelation. Oddly enough, five years past, when he had been incorrigibly romantic, it would not have disgusted him a tenth as much as now when he was stripped clean of illusions.
“I see,” he remarked. “So to-day, with the present cost of living, Marian simply must marry. What an economic waste to have thrown away these five years in waiting for me! Why do you tell me this, Mrs. Latimer?”
“Only because it’s a relief to tell somebody,” she replied, “and because you said what you did about money, and because I wanted to show you that one might feel as you did, with even more reason, and still live and be tolerably happy.”
He shook his head.
“Very well, then,” she concluded desperately, “because truth is truth, and if I ever connived at anything against you I want to tell you of it.”
Stacey smiled. “You’re much more girlish than your daughter,” he said.
They were silent for a long while.
Then: “Did you have an awful, awful time, Stacey?” she asked softly.
He started. “Where? In France? Oh, yes, of course,” he replied, in a matter-of-fact voice.
“I thought of you so often,” she went on. “It must be dreadful to be an idealist and then see all your ideals go—violently—one by one—”
“Violently, yes,” he interrupted coolly. “Not one by one.”
“Crushed to death by facts—not average facts, all the horrible evil facts herded together and organized until they must have seemed normal!”
“Oh,” he said, “facts are facts! They aren’t either evil or good. And you’re much too polite in saying that I was an idealist. ‘Sentimentalist’ is the right word. Can’t say that the method employed to remove my illusions was particularly gentle, but I’m grateful enough for the removal.”
There was a look of pain on Mrs. Latimer’s face. “No! No!” she cried. “It isn’t fair! There’s good disillusionment and bad! It’s good to have false prettiness, false sentiment—whatever is false—scrubbed off, but it isn’t good, it isn’t fair to a man, to see only pain and death and agony and mud for four years and be made to feel that that’s all there is of true. It isn’t fair! It isn’t!”
Stacey’s face was pale but calm and touched with a distant haughty scorn of all things. “Oh, it wasn’t only that!” he said in a chill voice. “I doubt if that was even the profoundest lesson in disillusionment. That was the lesson of pain and brutality and ugliness and fatigue—incredible fatigue. It even had gleams of relief—flashes of lightning in chaos. Men showed themselves beasts, but with a capacity for enduring more suffering than you’d have thought possible. There was funk, of course,—individual cowardice and rank, bestial, mass terror, just as there was mass cruelty. But there was amazing heroism, too. And the men did carry on in spite of everything. Oh, no, the trouble with the front line was the senselessness of squandering so much life. The place to get real disillusionment—where you learned the senselessnessandsordidness of life itself—was behind the lines, back where things were neat and pretty, where the officers had feuds over questions of personal prestige, and stupid fools gave orders disposing of men’s lives, and the peasants gouged the soldiers for all they were worth. Or back in Paris where the shop-keepers gouged every one. And the Y. M. C. A. with their silly sloppy Christianity—all for the best in the best of all possible worlds! Or down in Italy, where butter and sugar were rationed down to the minutest fragments and there wasn’t enough so that women and children could always get even those tiny rations, and yet some people had butter on their table in quantities three times a day and bought sugar in five-kilo packages at their back doors at six times the established price.Andthe American Red Cross with its silly pompous ‘majors’ and ‘colonels’ out for decorations! ‘Colonel’ So-and-So thought he’d been slighted, and ‘Major’ Thingumbob absolutelywasgoing to be given a place on the balcony when that ceremony came off, by God he was or know the reason why!Andthe Committee on Public Misinformation! And no coal to run trains enough to carry the people who absolutely had to travel, and President Wilson coming to Rome with a million journalists!” He laughed harshly. “Or, for the matter of that,—America! I haven’t seen very much of it yet, but I gather—oh, I gather a great deal!”
Stacey paused at last. But he did not look crushed or dejected by his enumeration of abuses. He looked more alive than before. He looked like a young, evil, disdainful god.
It was Mrs. Latimer whose face was white. “Poor Stacey!” she murmured brokenly. “All true, no doubt, but not the whole truth! Poor Stacey!”
“Poor me?” he asked. “Why? I’m all right, and free—or almost.”
“Free, or almost?” she repeated.
He frowned. “Wisps of old things hang around futilely and bother me a trifle—like soft fog around a ship, but I’ll get rid of them,” he said confidently.
“So as to be free?”
“Yes.”
She reflected for a moment. “Why do you want to be free?” she asked timidly. “What will you do with freedom, Stacey?”
“Do with it? Nothing! It’s an end in itself. Isn’t it aim enough to want to get rid of association with the kind of thing I’ve been chronicling?”
She shook her head. “It might be. It isn’tyouraim, Stacey. And anyway one can’t be free. Oh, Stacey, forgive an old woman who is fond of you,—but you—you’ve come back a different person than you went away, and indeed you must, to live, follow that old, old advice: ‘Know Thyself’!”
He stared at her sullenly.
“I know you’re determined not to, but you must!” she cried.
“Haven’t I,” he said coldly, “been regaling you with reams about myself?”
She shook her head again. “You haven’t even scratched the surface. It’s late, my dear boy,” she added. “Please take me home.”
Philip Blair and Stacey had been hunting houses. Catherine and the boys were to come on when one had been found and enough furniture rented to live with until their own could be shipped.
Houses to let were scarce, applicants numerous, and rents high. But Stacey employed obstinate pressure and actually presented his friend with a choice of three. Which, better than anything else, indicates the position of the Carroll family in Vernon.
The thing was done, the lease signed, and the agent had left them; but Phil and Stacey stood for a little while on the wooden porch of Phil’s new house, looking down at the city.
Vernon was, for the most part, flat, but one hill of moderate eminence it did possess, which, in the narrow early days when the city was young and a man was deemed successful if he had at sixty amassed a fortune of a hundred thousand dollars, had been the supreme centre of fashion, as was evidenced by the towers (to say nothing of the lightning rods) on the now dingy frame houses. Stacey himself had lived on this hill when a small boy, and the school he had attended still crowned it. But those were the days when Vernon’s best citizens boasted that Vernon had a population of a hundred thousand (which it did not have). Now Vernon had two hundred and twenty-five or perhaps two hundred and fifty thousand, and its best citizens did not much care. The crowded business section had flowed to the foot of the hill and even burst like a wave upon it, spattering its slopes with small garages and second-rate shops. Noise rose and the odor of smoke. Fashion had long since departed—to the edge of the city, where the Carrolls lived, or still farther, to the hills that rose beyond.
Stacey withdrew his eyes from the prospect and glanced sharply about him at the porch, the steps, and the small front yard. “Sordid kind of place to have to live in,” he remarked. “Sorry I can’t get anything better for you.”
Philip Blair smiled his pleasant gentle smile. “You know you don’t think that, Stacey,” he returned. “You’re only saying what you take to be the proper thing. At heart you don’t feel that it matters in the least where one lives.”
“No, I suppose not,” Stacey assented absently. He was again staring off at the city. It stretched out, monotonous and unbroken save where the afternoon sunlight glittered on the two converging branches of its sluggish river.
“I wish,” said Phil shyly, after a pause, “that you’d let me thank you—for this whole business.”
“For God’s sake, don’t!” Stacey exclaimed sharply. “Thank me if I give you anything real—peace or—or freedom. Don’t thank me for anything to do with money!”
Indeed, he did not want to be thanked. Gratitude was a bond, the recognition of gratitude a bond.
Phil looked at him sadly, but Stacey did not see; his eyes were still fixed on the city.
“The solidity,” he muttered at last, “the damned solidity of it! Did you ever see anything like it?” he burst out, turning on Phil.
“The solidity of what?”
“Of that! Of the city! I didn’t feel it at first when I got back. It’s getting on my nerves now. There are churches in it where men preach at it, and lecture halls where men talk at it, and auditoriums where it’s sung at and played at,—faugh! Children with puffed-out cheeks trying to blow down a house! Why, look at it! It’s only sixty years old, yet it’s more eternally unchangeable than the Pyramids!”
“Well,” said Phil slowly, “what’s wrong with that? Why should it change?”
“Why? The whole world has gone through agony, has been wrenched and torn until not one atom of it, not one emotion, not one value, remains as it was,—and here is this damned ignoble changeless place that doesn’t know there’s been a war—or pretends not to know, so that it won’t be expected to change. Nothing can change it, I tell you,—but bombs!”
“But,” Phil asked steadily, “how do you want to change it? What do you want to do for it?”
“Nothing!” Stacey cried. “I don’t want to change it, either for better or worse. Nobody can change what a war like this couldn’t change. I want,” he concluded, his eyes glowing strangely, “to wipe it out, annihilate it! Bombs, I said. Nothing else is any good.”
A look of pain crossed Philip Blair’s face. “I think,” he said, “that you’re a little mad, Stacey.”
“Maybe,” said Stacey, with a short laugh.
“Because it isn’t only Vernon you’d have to destroy. Everything’s that way—unchanging. It has to be, I suppose, to endure. People have their own lives. They can’t change so very much. Even mothers don’t die because their sons have died. They suffer for a while, then forget. Vernon and the Middle-West shock you now because they’ve been too removed and too unimaginative to suffer at the war. They’ve scarcely felt the war. While you’ve been in places all raw with pain. But they, too, will get over it and be like Vernon. It isn’t Vernon you’d have to destroy. It’s all humanity.”
Stacey’s face was inscrutable. Not a muscle in it had moved. But his eyes had grown dark with a kind of shadow. “Maybe,” he said again quietly. “Come on! Let’s go.”
They went down the steps and along the brief board-walk to Stacey’s car, which was parked before the house.
Dinner was at seven, and they were in the living-room at ten minutes to. It was the one admonition Stacey had given Phil on the latter’s arrival the day before. “Do as you please in everything—only be on time at meals,” he had said.
Mr. Carroll was waiting for them, with cocktails ready to pour. He was in a genial mood and nodded appreciatively at the younger men’s promptness. “Pleasure to have to do with people who understand that seven means seven,” he observed. “You wouldn’t believe, Blair, the trouble I used to have with Stacey. He was almost as bad as his sister in his contempt for time.” He poured the cocktails. “Make them myself nowadays,” he explained. “I have profound respect for Parker, but I don’t want to strain his integrity too much. You can’t even trust the men at the club not to rifle one another’s lockers. Not that Parker wouldn’t make a more creditable member than a good many of them.”
They laughed.
“Dare say,” remarked Stacey. “But now this question of being on time,—I can see two sides to it.”
“Two?” his father exclaimed. “Not a bit of it! There’s only one side.”
“No, it’s a matter of two opposing theories of life. One is that you should always be on time so as to avoid inconveniencing one another and wasting energy and having dishes get cold. The other is that you shouldn’t worry too much about promptness or you let time get the upper hand of you and run your life.”
“Fiddlesticks!” Mr. Carroll interrupted, “It will run your life more if you neglect it.”
“Yes, that’s a point for you. I knew an Italian family in Rome, delightful people,—several branches of the family there were—lived all over the city. They were always going places togetheren masse. But it took them forever to get assembled. Once they stood in the rain in three separate bunches in three distinct and distant parts of Rome because they’d all forgotten at just what time they were to meet and where. No, you’re a slave if you disregard time and a slave if you bow down to it. You’re had either way.”
“Pshaw!” said Mr. Carroll.
“I rather think that there’s a little more to it,” Phil observed quietly. “I think Mr. Carroll’s side is right. Itisbetter to be prompt. But not because you save time that way and are more efficient. Rather because you establish an apparent medium of smoothness to live in, make everythingseempermanent, eternal and of value. To have the nine-seven train pull gently out of the Pennsylvania Station at precisely nine-seven gives you a feeling of confidence, a sense that everything’s going to be all right. An illusion, of course, but essential. A lot of bohemian marriages break up just because they don’t have it there, stable and making marriage seem stable.”
Mr. Carroll nodded. “Something in that, maybe,” he observed.
But dinner was announced, and they went in.
“Did you find a house?” Mr. Carroll inquired after a while.
“Yes,” said Phil. “I’m awfully pleased.”
“Where?”
Stacey told him.
Mr. Carroll fairly snorted. “Stacey, I’m ashamed of you!” he cried. “Blair can’t live in a hovel like that. He can’t surround his children with all that coal-dust and noise.”
“I give you my word, Mr. Carroll,” Phil protested, “that it’s a lot better than where we’ve been living. I really like the place. I can run a lawn-mower in the evening.”
But the older man shook his head impatiently. “Now look here!” he said. “This house of mine is three times too big for Stacey and me, especially since Julie married. You bring your wife and children here to live—anyway until you can find something really decent or build if you decide to stay.”
Philip Blair flushed slightly. “I never heard of anything quite so generous as that, sir,” he replied, a trifle unsteadily, “but I can’t possibly accept.” And there was a gentle decision in his voice.
“Well, well, well! I’d have been glad to have you,” said Mr. Carroll, and dropped the subject.
Stacey recognized that his father’s offer was more than ordinarily generous, especially since Mr. Carroll liked to lead his own life. And he would have lived up to it, Stacey knew. He would have tried to crush Phil’s opinions into the mold of his own and he would certainly have been cross if Phil or Catherine were late at meals or showed Bolshevik leanings, but in his own way, and with externals, he would have been both impetuously and consistently generous. He would probably even have given Phil a key to the wine-cellar. All this Stacey understood, and with it his father. But his understanding was intellectual. He should have felt a warm glow, but he did not. The only emotion he felt was a faint sadness at feeling nothing. “Dead!” he muttered to himself. “Dead as they make ’em!”
Yet he would not really have chosen to feel.
At coffee time a friend of Mr. Carroll’s dropped in to play pinochle, and Phil and Stacey went upstairs.
But Stacey was restless. He wanted to see Marian and resented the desire—another bond that he could not shake free of. Moreover, he knew that in Marian’s presence he should dislike her. So the endurance of the desire was doubly exasperating. All this lack of harmony—even of common sense!
“I think I’ll go over to see Marian Latimer,” he said at last to Phil. “Be glad to have you come along. Really, you know.”
“Thanks,” returned Phil, “no. I’m a bit fagged. Quite sincere about it. Run along.”
“I’ll find out first whether she’s in,” Stacey said, and lifted the receiver of the telephone on his desk. They were in his study. “If she isn’t I’ll go to a movie,” he added, while waiting for his number.
He got the house and, after a minute, Marian. She laughed musically in response to his question. “Why, yes, come! Do come!” she said.
Her laughter made him angry—but not with her, with himself. It was not her recognition of her power over him that he minded. It was that power itself.
He walked to her house—a matter of a mile. He never used a motor car nowadays if he could get anywhere without one. Swift walking calmed the persistent fever of his blood.
Mr. and Mrs. Latimer were in the drawing-room, and he stood there for a few minutes, chatting with them.
“Marian is in the library,” said Mr. Latimer presently. “She left word that you were to go up as soon as you came.”
“Ames Price is there, too,” Mrs. Latimer put in quietly.
“All right,” said Stacey, with apparent equanimity. “Thanks.”
But he saw Mr. Latimer flash a sudden glance of anger at his wife, who, however, went on with her knitting calmly.
“So that’s the way the land lies,” Stacey reflected, as he climbed the stairs. “Papa has been told, or, more likely, has found out. Decent of Mrs. Latimer, very!” Nevertheless, he was unhappy.
He knocked at the library door, and Marian called to him to enter.
She was curled up in her favorite arm-chair, and Ames Price was rising from a smaller chair near-by.
Marian gave Stacey a look of mischievous defiance. But he went over and shook hands with her so pleasantly and coolly that her eyes grew suddenly puzzled.
“Hello, Ames,” he said then, shaking his rival’s hand. “Haven’t seen you for years. How’ve you been?”
“First-class!” replied the other, eyeing Stacey doubtfully. “You look pretty fit.”
He was a tall, fair, loosely built man of forty, smooth-shaven and slightly bald. Stacey had known him in a casual way for years, but all that he really knew about him was that he had inherited money, had managed it well enough, was said to be a bit fast—but not excessively, and played an admirable game of golf. So far as Stacey or any one else was aware, there had been (except for golf) no passions in Ames’s life. Stacey felt a little sorry for him, that he should have been overwhelmed now by this one. Marian would make him uncomfortable. She would demand a great variety of emotions of him.
But, in spite of himself, Stacey also felt a hot jealousy. By Jove, Marianwasbeautiful!
“I suppose,” said Ames, with proper politeness, “that you must have had a pretty rough time in France. You were over the deuce of a while. I didn’t get across myself—division just about to sail when the Armistice came along.”
There was a touch of constraint in his tone. Stacey understood it at once. It was as though Ames had said: “You come back a hero. What chance have I got against you?”
“Oh, well,” Stacey returned, pleasantly enough, “that’s all done with now. Here we all are again. There’s no change in anything, really.”
He glanced at Marian. She was surveying the situation distantly, with a faint amused smile. Stacey’s own sensations beneath his calm demeanor were turbulent and mixed. He desired Marian keenly, hated to let her go, yet felt an antagonism for her that his desire increased rather than diminished. He was jealous of Ames, yet not in the least hostile toward him,—almost kindly, in fact.
“Going to build houses again?” Ames asked.
Stacey considered him for a moment, then Marian, and in that moment wrenched himself free.
“No,” he said, “I believe I’ll go away—travel. Funny thing, but a long stretch of the war-stuff turns a man into a rather solitary animal. Maybe it’s the noise of the guns that’s shut him off for so long from companionship.”
He was not really thinking, except vaguely, of leaving Vernon, and had spoken principally to reassure Ames; for which uncharacteristically benevolent act he was immediately rewarded. The other man’s face relaxed from anxiety into an expression so blissful as to be silly. In spite of his conflicting emotions, Stacey could hardly keep from laughing.
“We shall all be awfully sorry to have you go, Stacey,” said Marian gently. “I shall, especially.”
This might be directed at Ames (Marian was certain to spend a great deal of time in hurting Ames), but Stacey did not think it was. For it was a simple remark, simply phrased. And Marian sat there, quiet, carved, thinking no doubt that Stacey liked her best that way.
Well, he did.
Before long he rose to go. He would have liked to remain and look at Marian, but he had a well developed sense of fair play. Let Ames be happy! And deeper than this was the feeling that since he, Stacey, had decided for freedom he had better begin to act on the decision at once. That was it—act! do something! It was the only release from everything.
But when he rose Marian rose too, and accompanied him out into the hall, and closed the door behind her. Ames did not seem to mind. When Marian excused herself his rather vacuous face was as radiant as before. What more natural than that a girl should find it fitting to say good-bye to an outgrown lover of her early youth?
Ames would not, perhaps, have been so calm about it had he witnessed the setting and details. For outside the door Marian paused only for an instant to look up at Stacey, then, with a gesture of her hand to him, hurried down the hall a few yards, stopped abruptly at a door that opened off from it, turned the knob gently, and, giving first one swift glance up and down the hall, pulled Stacey a little way into the room beyond.
He gazed around him quickly. There was no light save that which came from the hall. It was Marian’s bedroom.
He turned on her and seized her wrists, his heart beating violently. But his hostility rose, wave for wave, with his passion. What a trick to play on him! Deliberate! Deliberate!
But she stood there, close to him, perfectly still, looking up into his eyes. The corners of her mouth trembled a little.
They kissed, madly.
“Good-bye, Stacey,” she murmured faintly, when he had released her. “Don’t think I was—trying to hold you. I wasn’t. I only wanted to say good-bye—like this. I think you’re—right—and I won’t hate you—any more than I can help. Good-bye!” And, with another swift glance up and down, she drew him back into the hall.
But when she was already half way to the library door she turned and came back a step or two. Her eyes were wet, but her mouth had curved into a mischievous smile.
“Poor Ames!” she said, and was gone.
Stacey managed to leave the house without seeing either Mr. or Mrs. Latimer. He walked away swiftly. And when the confusion of his senses wore off he began to see into things a little more deeply than before. He saw his feeling toward Marian as it really was and as, he perceived, Marian had understood it—animal desire and love of beauty. Desire was a bond. It hurt to have it go. Stacey felt a painful emptiness, as though he had torn something violently from his heart. Yet he also felt a kind of exultation.