Life in Vernon went on and on, and Stacey watched it proceed. But his attitude remained one of scornful indifference through which flickered occasional gleams of sudden eager interest, anger or hate. The perception of greed was one of the things that stirred him most frequently, and it grew within him until it amounted almost to a fixed idea. His hatred of money, its symbol, became fanatical. He would have renounced his own income entirely, except that he did not want to throw himself into the mêlée just yet, but somehow to see things through from outside—though through to where, he could not have said. As it was, he retained two hundred dollars a month and sent the rest to the relief fund for Viennese children. In this he was making no effort to live up to a principle, to conform himself to some ideal of life; if he had been, he would have sent all. He was, almost solely, striving for freedom from something he hated. Not quite solely, however, or why did he make this particular disposition of the money? He refused to answer the question. He would be free from what he loved as well as from what he hated.
One carefully covered-up aspect of life in Vernon did interest Stacey. Existence thereseemedthe same as formerly, people thought it was—though perhaps a few of them only pretended to think so; but at bottom certain fundamental relationships were shaken. Men paid eighteen dollars for a pair of shoes for which five years back they would have paid seven, or, not buying them, would next day have to pay twenty-three; women would offer sixty dollars a month for a maid, then not get her. The majority said that the cost of living was outrageous and servants scarce, and went superbly on as before. But Stacey grinned at them malignantly. He stamped on the ground and heard a hollow sound.
Therefore, although by this time his father talked to him almost with constraint and gave him often a wistful puzzled glance, Stacey himself felt a juster appreciation of his father than at first. Mr. Carroll was partizan down to the tips of his toes, but he did know that more was abroad than mere surface changes. His angry thought of Bolshevism was an obsession. And, knowing his father’s nature to be kindly and impulsive, Stacey gave him credit for something more than the mere desire to hold what he had got,—which Stacey thought he discerned beneath the vehemence of most perturbed capitalists—Colin Jeffries, for instance. No, Mr. Carroll was in arms for principles he believed in.
As for Stacey, he neither believed in them nor in those that opposed them. It was unfortunate. He would have been much happier if he could have thrown himself actively into the fray on one side or the other. Not because he craved human association; he did not. He was singularly solitary and aloof—with a white-hot kind of aloofness. But because he craved action.
There was strike after strike of labor in Vernon. They became almost the only subject of conversation. Even women discussed them, at teas or in their electrics as they drove to the movies. There was no coal for a while; then the workmen in all the mills struck; then the river dock-hands went out, and were promptly joined by the truck and dray men. This last strike tied up nearly everything.
Stacey was interested. He walked down to strike headquarters one afternoon and faced one of the sullen groups of men gathered in the dishevelled yard before the low brick building.
“What is it you fellows want?” he asked curiously.
There ensued a rumble of hostile voices and some sharp cries. “Beat it, you bum!” “Get to hell out of here, you damned aristocrat!”
“Oh, shut up! I want to know,” Stacey said impatiently. “You must have some idea about it.”
The rumble became a roar, a man struck out at Stacey, and Stacey promptly knocked him down. There was a general mix-up during which Stacey was surprised to find a man—one of the laborers, so far as he had time to see—fighting efficiently on his side.
The police, who must have been close-at-hand, presently smashed up the affray and rescued the two, whereupon Stacey, rather battered, but happier than he had been for a long while, swung about to investigate his comrade-in-arms.
“By the Lord! Burnham!” he cried, with real pleasure.
“The same, Captain,” said the other, instinctively raising his hand in salute, then dropping it again awkwardly.
But Stacey seized the hand and wrung it. Burnham had been first sergeant in one of his two companies.
Stacey gave his name to the police, observed that he was much obliged but that there was nothing to make a fuss about, and walked away with Burnham.
“Quite like old times, eh?” he remarked.
“Oh, this!” said Burnham, and spat scornfully.
“What are you doing up here?” Stacey demanded. “Thought you lived in Omaha.”
“Well, I did. And my wife and kids are still there with my wife’s sister. But I heard there was good work with better pay up here, so I come up to see, and I was drivin’ a truck, and then the boys went out—”
“Oh, look here!” cried Stacey. “Then you were one of them! I swear I’m sorry! This will put you in bad with the others, won’t it?”
Burnham grinned. “They won’t exactly be coming around and begging me to have another drink of ginger extract on them,” he admitted. “It don’t matter, Captain, honest it don’t! I was going back to Omaha anyway.”
Stacey stopped walking and stared at him curiously. “Why on earth did you side with me?” he asked.
“I dunno,” said the other, looking down and shuffling with his feet on the sidewalk. “Habit, I guess. No,” he added, looking Stacey in the eye, while a dull flush spread over his face, “no, it ain’t that. I’d go anywhere you went, Captain, even if it was straight to hell. Pshaw, hell would be a song compared with some of the places I’ve gone with you!”
Stacey was touched and also disturbed. What a responsibility! Here was a bond with a vengeance!
“I’m blessed if I know why,” he murmured, and they walked on. “And yet,” he exclaimed suddenly, “you’ve been here in Vernon for I don’t know how long and haven’t even come to see me! Is hell the only place you’ll accompany me to? Have you got a special preference for it?”
Burnham hung his head. “Well, you see,” he muttered, “you’re such a confounded swell up here, Captain!”
Stacey again paused abruptly and turned on the man. “Damn you, Burnham, I’m not!” he cried. “What do you say that for?”
“Well,” said Burnham apologetically, “maybe you don’t want to be, maybe you ain’t, but I guess you’ll have a hell of a time not to be. Looks to me like every one’s gone back the way they was before.”
Stacey felt profoundly discouraged, the comment was so obviously true.
“Was that what the men down there had against me?” he inquired almost humbly, walking on once more.
“Sure!” Burnham assented. “The boys are all right, but they’re touchy. And you blow in, not meaning any harm—but they didn’t know that, not knowing you like I know you—and you ask them what the matter is, like a man giving orders, and they get sore.”
Sullen anger with himself crept over Stacey. It was all true enough. Hehadspoken to the men crisply, like one in authority. There was no use in explaining to them, or even to Burnham, that this was not because he was a Vernon Carroll but because he could not rid himself of the military habit of command in word and thought. There was no use in explaining anything to anybody. Bonds? He was tied hand and foot with them!
“By the way,” he asked quietly, “whatisit they want, Burnham?”
“They’re getting seventy cents an hour—my crowd, I mean. They want eighty.”
“I see.”
They continued, in silence, until at last they reached the Carroll house. Burnham paused to look up at it.
“Some place, Captain!” he observed appreciatively.
“You know it?”
“Yes, I—I’ve been by here before,” said Burnham sheepishly.
“Oh, you’ve been by here before, have you?” Stacey returned sharply. “Well, you’re not going by this time. You’re coming in.”
“No, now listen, Captain! I’m going to take the tenP.M.for Omaha.”
“Well, you can start for it from here as well as from anywhere else. Come now! March!”
Newspaper reporters were ringing Stacey insistently on the telephone.
“Pshaw!” he answered. “Nothing to it. Went down to strike headquarters to ask silly questions, and got into a baby fracas, as I deserved to. No casualties. No, I can’t tell you any more. There isn’t any more to tell.”
He took Burnham up to his study and made him sit down. “Now I tell you what we’ll do,” he said. “About nine-fifteen or so we’ll drive around to your boarding-house or wherever it is you’ve been living and pick up your things—”
Burnham was grinning. “Gee, Captain, you’re innocent, considering what kind of things you’ve been through!” he interrupted. “D’you think after what’s happened that I’d find any of my stuff there? I’d find a bunch of the boys waiting to beat me up.”
“Oh!” said Stacey. And, paying no heed to Burnham’s embarrassed protestations, he pulled a travelling-bag from a closet and packed it. “Oh, shut up!” he said finally. “Go into the bath-room there and wash. You’re even dirtier than I am.”
Presently the door of the study was thrown open and Mr. Carroll hurried in, red-faced and out of breath. “I’ve just heard,” he panted. “Did those damned scoundrels do you any—”
“Sh!” said Stacey, raising his finger to his lip, as Burnham came out of the bath-room. “Father, this is Burnham, my first sergeant—C Company—and as good a man as I’ve run up against. Incidentally, though he’s one of the boys who’re striking, he turned in and fought them with me this afternoon. Whole thing very silly. Neither of us hurt at all. Burnham will stay to dinner.”
Mr. Carroll looked at Burnham keenly and held out his hand. “I’m glad to know you, Sergeant,” he said.
“American Legion Veteran Attacked By Strikers!” announced the newspaper headlines next morning.
“The striking dock and dray men added another outrage to their intolerable behavior when they yesterday violently attacked former Captain Stacey Carroll, D.S.C., a hero ofnumerous battles in the late World War and son of Edward H. Carroll of this city. Captain Carroll had gone to strike headquarters at 13 Plumb Street at about five o’clock yesterday afternoon in a generous attempt to learn the men’s side of the case. His friendly questions, however, were met by a brutal assault. This time, however, the strikers mistook their man, and the only result of the attempted outrage is that Michael Dennis (24) has a broken nose, Vladimir Sarovitch (20) a black and blue facial coloring that improves his former appearance, while Lorenzo Cecchi (21) is in the City Hospital with a fractured wrist. The public will be relieved to learn that Captain Carroll is uninjured except for a few superficial bruises. Dennis and Sarovitch were arrested on a charge of assault and battery but were promptly released on bail, money, as is well known, being plentiful at strike headquarters.
“This brutal and uncalled-for assault upon a hero of the World War marks” . . . etc.
Stacey was infuriated. He wrote a sharp fetter to the paper, then, with grudging common sense, tore it up and wrote another milder one in which he protested that the whole affair was due to a misunderstanding and was anyway too unimportant to deserve mention in the press.
He went to the hospital to see Cecchi, a handsome dark-haired Neapolitan who stared at him angrily at first out of immense black eyes till Stacey apologized to him in Italian, after which the two conversed in that language with an increasing good humor that was heightened by their puzzled pauses over Stacey’s mistakes and Cecchi’s dialect. The interview put them almost on terms of intimacy. Stacey gave the Neapolitan, who had fought in the Battle of the Piave, some Austrian bank-notes printed in Italian for use in Venetia during the invasion, and Cecchi responded with a tiny silver medal of the Madonna.
“Accidenti alla stampa!” (damn newspapers!) they agreed heartily.
But Stacey’s pleasant frame of mind on leaving the hospital was destroyed by his glimpse of the morning paper’s noon edition. His letter was there, but ruined by the caption above: “Captain Carroll’s Generous Reply—Makes Light of Cowardly Attack—Would Exonerate Strikers,” and by the fulsome eulogy of his behavior that followed. A vibrant editorial completed the wreck, insisting that while the personal magnanimity shown in Captain Carroll’s letter must appeal to every red-blooded citizen, the time had at last come when law and order must be . . . etc.
Without the slightest desire to align himself either on one side or the other, save that he felt a little more personal sympathy with the strikers, who anyway lived in touch with the few realities of life, than with their opponents, Stacey saw himself established irremediably as a Saint-George-like champion of law and order. He damned the press more earnestly than before. He lunched at the club with his father, whose eyes shone with approval of him, and he had, moreover, to undergo an ordeal of praise and congratulation from his father’s friends, together with briefer, less intense words from men of his own age. (The younger men, he told himself, were anyhow less grandiloquent nowadays than the older, though perhaps this was only because theywereyounger). Once or twice he tried impatiently to explain the silly business as it really was, but unavailingly. Anything he said was taken, he saw, as merely a further proof of his generosity. He gave up the attempt sulkily. Clearly his position was fixed. People had made up their minds about him, his reputation was solidly established, and nothing he might henceforth do could affect it. It struck him that the levity with which people acquired convictions would be ghastly if it were not so ridiculous.
Deserting the club with a feeling of relief, he wandered aimlessly about the city. But toward five o’clock, being caught in a sudden rain-shower, he took refuge in Philip Blair’s house.
As a matter of fact, there were other houses closer-by that would have afforded shelter, and it was at least partly from preference that he chose this one. He had not regained his old warm affection for Phil and Catherine, but their society was like a temporary balm applied to his fevered restless mind. No touch of greed was in them. They were, Stacey concluded, hardly human.
Phil had not yet returned from the office, but Catherine was at home with her two sons—Carter, now nine years old, and Jack, who was seven.
She welcomed him with her pleasant smile, that was like light shining coolly through an alabaster bowl, but also with characteristic constraint. She was only perfectly at ease with him when Phil, too, was present and less demand for expression was thus put upon her. “Shy,” thought Stacey once again. “Shy as Truth herself!” But he did not mind her shyness; he liked it. Being with Catherine was like bathing in a bottomless pool of clear translucent water. Fancies such as this, resembling those among which he had formerly lived so familiarly, came to him now only when he was with the Blairs. The fact should have revealed to him much that was obscure in himself; but it did not.
There was no constraint in Carter’s and Jack’s greetings.
“Uncle Stacey,” cried Carter immediately, “I got A in arithmetic on my report in New York and A in reading and B-Plus in spelling!”
“Well, that’s good,” said Stacey. “What did you get in conduct?”
Catherine smiled.
“C-Plus,” said Carter in a small voice. But his depression did not last long. “Uncle Stacey,” he exclaimed, “do ‘Fly away, Jack! Fly away, Jill!’ for him.” He pointed to his brother. “I bet he can’t guess the secret! I bet he’ll look all over the room for them!” And Carter grinned a delighted toothless grin.
“H’m!” observed Stacey, obediently making the necessary preparations, “I remember some one else who looked all over the room for them a few years ago.”
“I guess you mean me,” Carter replied. “Well, I guess I did. I guess I was awful stupid maybe.”
“Carter,” said his mother, with a laugh, “there aren’t that many ‘guesses’ in the whole dictionary.”
Presently Phil arrived. He looked tired with the heat, but his thin face brightened when he saw Stacey there playing with the boys.
“Stacey, you’re a fraud!” he said. “What sort of behavior is this for a misanthrope? You ought to be gloating over what Jack and Carter will grow up to be.”
Catherine put an end to the game and sent the boys out to play on the porch. “Yes,” she said, as she closed the door upon them, “I guess Stacey doesn’t mean all he says. I guess he’s really kind-hearted. I guess he likes children, maybe.”
Phil stared at his wife and smiled. “For heaven’s sake, Catherine,” he demanded, “what’s come over your English?”
Stacey laughed. “Corrupting effect of Carter,” he explained. “Yes, of course I like children.”
“Would you like to have some of your own?” Phil asked.
Stacey reflected, frowning. “Yes,” he replied at last, “I think so. Just one, a boy, so that I could try bringing him up.”
Phil and Catherine both laughed.
“Upon my word,” said the former, “this is delightful! Fancy finding you not merely humanly usual but positively universal—a bachelor with theories on education! What is your present theory, my son?”
Stacey smiled. However, it had become difficult for him to smile, and when he did so his face took on uneasy lines. He was not at his best when smiling. He was at his best when his face remained impassive and soldierly.
“Oh,” he said drily, “it’s a romantic enough theory, quite Rousseau-like. I’ve just invented it this minute. If I had a son I should take him to live in the country, in some place where the landscape was neither too grand, and thus apt to arouse vast disturbing aspirations in him, nor yet ignominious and depressing, like these dingy middle-western plains. I would have him live among trees, that are handsome and do no harm, and associate familiarly with a great many kindly simple-minded animals such as dogs, cows and horses, with a few cultivated elegant animals such as cats, and—less frequently and intimately—with one or two goats, who are old, sophisticated and skeptical, thelibres penseursamong animals.”
“And with no humans at all, eh?”
“Well,” said Stacey dubiously, “perhaps now and then an occasional, very choice human, such as you or Catherine, just to show him what human beingscanbecome,—but rarely, Phil, rarely!”
“Thanks, from Catherine and myself,” Phil observed, with a rather weary smile, “but I’d rather you’d select some one else. I should be profoundly unwilling to pose as an example.”
“And I!” echoed Catherine. “Besides, I shouldn’t have time. I should have to be getting dinner for Phil and the boys—just as I must do now.” And she rose. “I’ve not been able to find a maid yet.”
But Stacey, considering Catherine and Phil, perceived, with a softening touch of sympathy, that they were both very tired and that no doubt he had been adding to their fatigue. These two lived with a life of their own, apart, serene, modestly adding their few grains of pure gold to that appallingly small treasure which represented the sole remainder of all these ages and ages of human existence. Yet because they did so, thought Stacey, because they were clear pin-points of light in chaos, all life was against them, chillingly indifferent where not actively hostile. The blackness swirled about with a malignant, dully sentient desire to engulf and extinguish them. They were repaid for their foolhardy torch-bearing, their unforgivable sin of having some meaning, by being ground down beneath the sordid difficulties of bare existence. Ames Price, who played golf, or Jimmy Prout, who tried law suits, or Colin Jeffries, who handled a dozen corporations of no value to life, had carpets unrolled obsequiously before them as they walked; while Phil must wear his genius frayed on hack labor and Catherine must cook for her family in a small hot kitchen. “What a brute of a world! What an ugly perverse mess of a world!” thought Stacey, with a fierce sick disgust. Worth nothing! Its hard won treasure was too tiny to justify such a colossal grovelling incoherence.
But while Stacey was reflecting moodily in this manner Catherine had gone into the kitchen. Stacey could hear her there, moving pots and pans. Suddenly he sprang up and went out after her.
“Look here, Catherine!” he said. “It’s too hot to cook this evening! Come on out with me. We’ll all go and have dinner at a chop-suey place. The boys, too, of course.”
She looked at him doubtfully for just a moment, then smiled. “Thank you, Stacey,” she said simply. “That will be awfully pleasant. I think Phil is pretty tired. I’ll go and get the boys ready.”
Stacey and Mrs. Latimer were having tea together. But, since Stacey had ceased to visit the Latimer home, they were having it at the “Sign of the Purple Parrot.”
This was a small but expensive tea-room recently opened on the fifth floor of a building close to the river front, and Stacey, as he entered it (for the first time), glanced swiftly about at its white walls, low white ceiling, small-paned windows with hangings of purple-figured cretonne, and at the purple wooden parrot on a tall standard in the centre of the room. A silver vase containing a single yellow rose decorated each of the ten or twelve little tables. Finally Stacey turned in mute amazement to his companion, since it was she who had suggested the place.
“They have very good tea,” she said, with an amused smile.
However, Miss Wilcox, proprietor of the tea-room, advanced toward them. “I’m so glad you’ve come early, before any one else, Mrs. Latimer,” she said, “because you can have one of the two tables out on the balcony. I’m sure you’d like that. They’re always the first to go.”
And accordingly they went outside and sat down in wicker chairs beneath a purple and white awning.
“Don’t you think it’s a nice idea,” asked Miss Wilcox, standing near them, “to try and use our river esthetically, Captain Carroll? ItisCaptain Carroll, isn’t it? I recognized you from your photograph. We’re honored to have you come. It seems such a shame to have this magnificent river and then use it solely for ugly business purposes. But that’s so often true in America, I think. Saint Louis is the same way. I should so like to have my modest little effort followed by others.”
Stacey said politely that he hoped it would be, and Miss Wilcox presently moved away.
“You mustn’t mind her, poor thing!” Mrs. Latimer observed kindly. “She’s devoted to her institution. It’s her child.”
“Preposterous virgin birth!” murmured Stacey, gazing down at the river.
It sweltered in the intense August sunlight. Barges and tugs moved up and down its sallow waters, and vast warehouses flanked it. Across on the further side was a train yard with multitudes of red freight cars, idle or with engines shunting them about. Trucks and drays rattled over the cobble stones of the streets leading down to the river (the strike having been settled some weeks since), and shouts rose and the odor of grease. And Stacey, turning away from it to order tea and scones from a capped and aproned maid who had come to his side, looked at her as though he did not believe in her.
“A movie world, Mrs. Latimer,” he remarked finally.
“Yes,” she said, “it is silly, isn’t it? This painted parrot, and the tea roses, and the tiny, fussy, white-and-purple room, trying to make itself noticed by that immense fierce reality out there! But it doesn’t do any harm, and I thought the incongruity of it might amuse you. Where has your sense of humor gone, Stacey? Once you would have laughed gaily at this.”
“Where does a china tea-cup go in an earthquake?” he responded absently, looking down again at the river, then back at the room. “No, of course there’s no harm in it,” he said, after a moment, “since it is so obviously absurd, but you might, I suppose, take it as a fantastic caricature of something—”
But Miss Wilcox was seating people at the other table of the balcony. “. . . so often true in America, I think,” she was saying. “Ishouldlike to have my modest little effort followed by others.”
Mrs. Latimer smiled, but Stacey did not. He waited impassively until Miss Wilcox had finished speaking and had walked away.
“Now in the movies,” he continued, “you are presented with standards of behavior—sweetness and light, purity unsoiled, virtue triumphant, best of all possible worlds—that have nothing to do with real life. Seems impossible that real men and women could have posed for the pictures. You’d think the contrast with the promiscuity of their actual California divorce-court lives would be too strong. Not a bit of it! Well, that’s all right—if people like that kind of thing. Personally, I think it’s sickening. No matter how abominable real life is, I’d a thousand times rather have to live in it than in a Pollyanna, Mary Pickford, glad-and-tender world! Faugh!”
“So should I,” said Mrs. Latimer. “But if weary people find release in such tawdry fairy-tales—”
“Sure! Let them! Nobody’s business! But there’s the trouble. The silly stuff isn’t just taken as release. It gets accepted as truth. I mean to say, the ideals and standards are taken as those of real people. How in heaven’s name they can be by any member of a movie audience who knows anything about himself, I swear I can’t imagine, but they are.”
“Ah, but that’s the point!” said Mrs. Latimer gently. “They don’t know themselves. Even you don’t know yourself, Stacey.”
“I know enough about myself to see that I’m not like that. And what results? That any glimpse of truth is condemned as rotten, abnormal, pathological. For the movies are only a glowing example of a spirit that corrupts everything. Why, if a novelist were to take any man alive—I don’t say me, but somebody better—Jimmy Prout, for instance—and tell the whole truth about him, the ghastly things he did and the ghastlier ones he wanted to do but didn’t dare, what a row there’d be! The reviewers would call the book abominable, the hero a hopeless rotter, though every one of them has done or wanted to do things just as bad. A movie world, Mrs. Latimer! No truth in it!”
“Yes,” she said, “no doubt. I’d like it different, honester. But what harm does the pretence do? It even sets a standard of a sort, doesn’t it?”
“What harm?” he cried. “Why, it makes people shocked at German atrocities, as though they were sins committed by some alien inhuman monsters. Down with Prussianism? As much as you like! I’m glad we beat the Germans. So far, so good. But how about the Prussianism in ourselves? A movie world! A smug, lying, movie world!”
“But there is kindliness in it, too,” she said wistfully, “and generosity. I’ve met them both.”
“Yes,” Stacey assented somberly, “there is—in sudden impulses, more frequent, I’ll even concede, than these passing gusts of bestiality. But, so far as I can see, there’s only one real force, one motive, in life, that stays on and on and never dies. Greed!” he concluded fiercely.
Mrs. Latimer gazed at him for a moment in silence.
“And still you don’t see it all,” she said at last very gently. “You won’t look deeply enough into yourself. If you did you’d see the splendid spectacle of the human soul fighting all this that you describe—and without quarter, dear Stacey, as long as you have breath in you. Has your hatred of greed and lies no significance?”
“I don’t know,” he replied, drawing his hand across his forehead. “And I don’t see that I’m doing any splendid fighting. I don’t know what to fight. I merely fume impotently.” But the wild look of pain had disappeared from his eyes.
He fell to wondering about his companion. No optimist, surely. Doubtful of most things, but sweet and mellow in her skepticism. How had she attained such serenity?
“You must know Catherine, my friend Philip Blair’s wife,” he said suddenly. “You will like her, and she you. There’s truth in the hearts of both of you, and yet you’re different, somehow.”
“When you do say pretty things, they’re pleasant to hear, Stacey,” Mrs. Latimer replied, with a faint girlish blush, “because you seem not ever to be saying them for effect.”
Soon they rose to go. Neither of them had so much as alluded to the fact that Marian was to be married to Ames Price in a few weeks.
That same evening Stacey attended a meeting of the American Legion. His life was like that now, inconsequential. He went pointlessly from one unrelated fact to another.
Being in a far from constructive frame of mind, he had nothing against the Legion and nothing in favor of it. It had indeed occurred to him that if an organization founded on no common conviction, but on the mere fact that its members had all been in the army, should come to exert political influence, that influence would certainly be confusing and might be harmful; on the contrary, if the young men who had been soldiers wanted to play together, why not? But these were idle thoughts. At heart he did not care one way or the other about the Legion. If he had shown more interest he might perhaps, in view of his record, have been elected commander of the post; but this is doubtful. He was a wealthy son of a wealthy father, and class antagonisms were not absent from the Legion.
Up to now he had attended only one meeting, but he had learned that to-night a protest was to be presented against the engagement of Fritz Kreisler to play in Vernon in the coming autumn; and Stacey, disgusted, was out to see if there was anything he could do to head off such nonsense.
It was a full meeting. There were several hundred men in the large hall when Stacey entered, and tobacco smoke hung over them in a dull blue mist. The commander of the post was already in the chair, and the business of reading minutes was under way. Stacey dropped into a seat and waited abstractedly.
He did not have long to wait. Excitement buzzed in a group near the centre of the room, and a young captain sprang up. Stacey knew him by sight. His unit was that to which Jimmy Prout had belonged. It had never left Camp Grant.
“Mr. Commander and Comrades!” he began tensely. “You know what I want to say. It’s about this business of letting an enemy come here and take our money, just as if nothing had ever happened. You know who I mean. I mean Kreisler. Kreisler was our enemy in the war. It doesn’t make any difference that he didn’t happen to fight against Americans or that he was out of it before we went in. He was on the wrong side. He supported the side that did all the—the atrocities you know about. And what I want to say is that if we’re asked to give him our support and our money it’s an outrage. And so,” he added, unfolding a paper, “I propose the following motion:
“We, the members of the John Harton Post of the American Legion, hereby express our amazement and strong disapproval of the action of the manager of the Park Street Theatre in engaging Fritz Kreisler, recently a soldier in the Austrian army, to play at a concert in the city of Vernon less than one year after the conclusion of a great war during which thousands of American lives were sacrificed to defeat the very principles that Herr Kreisler supported. And we hereby request the manager of said theatre to cancel Herr Kreisler’s engagement, and notify him that failure to do so will result in an attitude of marked disinclination to patronize said theatre on the part of the members of this post.”
And the young captain sat down amid applause, during which half a dozen voices seconded the motion.
“Are there any remarks?” asked the chairman calmly.
Stacey was smiling a little at the contrast between the phraseology of the introduction and that of the motion, but, half risen in his seat, he was also looking about him keenly. It did not strike him that the tensity was universal. There were sluggish centres of indifference in the hall, and not many remarks were being made.
Presently he rose to his feet, obtained recognition, and made his way to the front of the room amid some considerable interest.
“I quite agree with Captain Small,” he said, leaning against the chairman’s desk, “that it doesn’t make any difference that Kreisler was an Austrian instead of a German, and that the unit in which he fought never faced an American unit. Aside from that, I disagree with him in everything. It strikes me that for this post to pass any such motion as that proposed would be silly. Kreisler fought against us? Well, what of it? So did a lot of other good men. If we don’t admit that we depreciate our own achievement. Gentlemen, I call to your attention the advice given some months since by a newspaper in Rome. ‘There are a large number of people sitting in a large number of offices, and especially those who never saw service at the front,’ this paper said, ‘who ought to be made to write:The war is over! The war is over!twenty times a day until they get the fact into their heads’.”
There was a murmur of laughter; but Captain Small was on his feet, protesting angrily. “Mr. Commander!” he cried, “I object to the insinuation that Captain Carroll has made—I mean to say, that I never saw active service. If I didn’t it wasn’t my fault, and I—”
The chairman rapped with his gavel. “I am sure Captain Carroll intended no such suggestion,” he observed. “Go on, Captain.”
“Certainly not,” said Stacey coolly. “It was through no fault of Captain Small’s that he did not get to France. He was, I believe, one of the first to volunteer upon America’s entry into the war. But, having made that perfectly clear, and since the point has arisen, I call it to your attention that both the proposer of this motion and those who seconded it happen to be men who, though through no fault of their own, did not see fighting.”
A rumble of voices interrupted him, but he waved his hand for silence.
“Wait a minute! Let me finish! I say this not to create dissension, but because I want to show that I’m speaking not just for myself but for the point of view of the men who had the luck—good or bad—to fight the Germans in Flanders and the Argonne.”
He leaned forward and scrutinized the faces of the audience swiftly. There was something compelling in his presence. Undoubtedly he dominated the crowd, even against their will.
“You Franck!” he called sharply. “Are you against letting Kreisler play?”
“N-naw!” stammered the man addressed, startled.
“And you, Davies? You, Markovitch? You, Einstein? Jones? Thorburtson?”
“No!”—“No!”—shakes of the head—negatives all.
“Bruce?”
“Jesus Christ! no, Captain! Let him play and—”
Laughter broke out tumultuously, and the chairman pounded with his gavel.
“That’s all,” said Stacey, and sat down.
“I think,” said the commander, when silence had been partly restored, “that it would be unfortunate to divide this organization up into those who saw fighting and those who did not. We should stick together in everything.” But his words were perfunctory. He had been severely wounded at Les Eparges. “All in favor of the motion signify by saying Aye. Opposed, No.”
The motion was lost.
Stacey had won. But he was under no illusions. He had won by force, and he had made more enemies than friends. When he left the hall at the end of the meeting he was a solitary figure at whom men looked from a distance. He did not care. He preferred his solitude.
But outside, at the foot of the steps, Edwards, the commander, caught up with him and limped off beside him. He was a mechanic and a student, self-educated, and popular with labor. In high quarters he was solemnly suspected of being a socialist.
“What you said was right enough, Carroll,” he observed meditatively. “The trouble was with the way you said it. Too much outside. Too harsh and scornful.”
“Quite true,” Stacey assented. “That happens to be the way I personally am—harsh and scornful.”
Edwards shook his head. “You saw too much of it, I guess, Carroll,” he remarked. “Four whole years, wasn’t it? God in heaven! And more mud than we ever saw. Years more of mud! Filthy thing, the war, wasn’t it?”
Stacey laughed shortly. “Wait twenty years and see how people talk about it,” he said. “Banners waving! Steel-capped heroes! Glory! Glory! We’ll be talking that way, too.”
They walked on in silence.
“Oh, by the way, Edwards,” said Stacey suddenly, “you’re a labor man. I wish to God you’d set me right about that strike business. The thing was too silly the way it got into those rotten papers. I—”
Edwards was laughing quietly. “Pshaw!” he interrupted. “Do you think we don’t know the facts? That’s one thing we do know. The boys aren’t down on you. They’re not even down on Burnham now, though he did turn against them. Can’t say that you’re personally popular—too harsh and scornful, but you’re respected.”
“Well, that’s good,” said Stacey, with genuine relief.
“You ought to crawl through the needle’s eye and come in with us,” Edwards added, after a moment. “I don’t believe you give a damn for your money.”
“You do, though,—you labor people,” Stacey returned coldly. “You’re out for all you can get, regardless. How do you expect me to take sides either for or against you? Greed on one hand, greed on the other. Everywhere.”
“Saw too much of it, Carroll,” Edwards repeated. “Years too much. ’Night. I turn down here.”
Marian was married at Saint Grace’s early in September, and Stacey was present at the wedding.
A number of people looked at him curiously, for it was known to some that he and the bride had formerly been engaged; but they found nothing in Stacey’s face or bearing to reward them. There was general interest in the wedding, since Ames Price and Marian Latimer were both prominent; there were no excited whispered comments. No gossip linked Stacey’s name with Marian’s. And, indeed, it is an odd fact that it was difficult for a man and still more difficult for a woman to get talked about adversely in Vernon. This was particularly true if they were socially prominent. In that case they must do something almost publicly scandalous, must literally be “asking for it.” Which unfortunately does not signify that morals were any higher in Vernon than elsewhere.
Stacey’s sensations were as mixed as ever. He was able to perceive the smooth elegance of the show, made up of the flowers, the soft light creeping through the stained glass windows of the handsome church, the rustling of costly dresses, the low murmur of fashionable voices, the smiles, the easy greetings, the ushers, and the discreet music of the organ. And he was even able to note that, though Marian was fetching enough to arouse at her appearance on her father’s arm a sudden hum of admiration before silence fell softly, she was not really at her best in that trailing lace-and-satin wedding gown. No, she was more beautiful in a plain tailor-made suit with a short skirt. She would have looked best of all with her fair hair drawn back simply and bound with a ribbon, bare armed, and with a kirtle falling only to her knees. But beneath the surface calm of Stacey’s mind fire smoldered. He was angrily stirred, angrily jealous; for he had not freed himself completely from desire of Marian. Had he, after all, been a fool to renounce her? he wondered. He might have stood there by her side in Ames’s place. But at this he caught himself up scornfully. What? he thought brutally. Deliberately chain himself and her to a life of hopeless incompatibility because he desired to possess this girl’s beautiful body? Was the craving of his whole soul for freedom less passionate than the mere craving of his senses for satisfaction?
Poor Stacey! Contradictory, stormy, inharmonious! Made up of dissonances. Repelled by Marian, yet desiring her; avid of freedom, but avid, too, of hate—an enslaving bond if ever there was one; more passionately and truly in love with beauty than ever before, yet destructive of it in himself; full of power with nowhere to direct it; hard and bitter, yet honestly anguished by the pain in the world.
The ceremony over, he made his way out of the church as quickly as possible, but paused for a moment on the sidewalk to glance at the interminable line of handsome waiting motor cars. The irony in their expensive patronage of one of Christ’s churches made him suddenly smile. Then he set off on foot for the Latimer house, where the reception would be held.
It was very well done, he thought,—adequate, handsome,—er—elegant, without being vulgarly lavish; roses enough, but not “bowers” of roses—though “bowers” was what the paper next morning would say there had been; champagne punch, but not tubs and pools of it; decent air of gaiety, but no riot. Well, you could count on Mr. Latimer to carry the thing off in the right way. It was what he was for. Fifty-odd years of careful training, with never a moment wasted, had fitted him for the task.
Stacey wondered what Mrs. Latimer thought about it all. Oh, she would probably be as detached as always, humorously but not unkindly amused by it. However, he had no chance to find out. Mrs. Latimer was much too busy receiving.
His one real curiosity was to know how Marian would look at him when, in the line, he shook her hand and Ames’s. He decided that she would be candid, simple and virginal, as became a bride, with no hint of anything in her greeting. But he was wrong. He was unfair to Marian, fancying her far more deliberate than she really was. The swift look she gave him was strange and enigmatic, and stirred him. There was a touch of defiance in it, as though she had said: “Well, you would have it this way! Do you like what you’ve done?” And he could not blame her if the words she spoke were merely the proper words. There were people all about.
Later he came upon his sister, Julie.
“Oh, Stacey,” she said, “why couldn’t you be nice and go with me to the wedding? Jimmy’s out of town, so I went all alone. I saw you across the church from me and thought I’d pick you up afterward, but when I came out I couldn’t find you anywhere.”
He smiled at the protective solicitude in her tone. “Oh, well,” he returned, “I’ll drive back with you to your house for a little chat when you’re ready to go.”
“I’m ready now,” she said quickly, and they went out to her electric.
No one else had ventured to make any comment to Stacey when Marian’s engagement to Ames Price had been announced; even Mr. Carroll had only looked at his son in an odd puzzled way. But Julie had ventured. She had asserted loyally that Stacey was much too good for Marian, and that Marian didn’t care whom she married so long as he had money. He had reflected at the time that, though Julie simplified things down to bare essentials, it was essentials that she selected. She was not unlike their father in this, he thought. She returned to the subject now, as they glided along the city streets.
“I don’t care!” she broke out hotly. “I think she’s horrid! Of course I know it must have been you who broke off the engagement—now wasn’t it, Stacey? Why won’t you admit it? Why,anybodywould beproudto marry you!—but then for her to go and marry a stupid person like Ames Price, old enough to be her father, too, less than three months later,—why, I think it’s cheap! That’s what Marian is—cheap!”
Stacey laughed, amused at her desire to comfort him. He enjoyed being with his sister; nor was there anything patronizing in his feeling for her. He was not doing so admirably with a complex mind that he could afford to look comfortably down upon Julie for having a simple mind. And she was not stupid. He thought she did rather well with life.
“Oh,” he observed, “Ames isn’t as old as all that! He’s only forty or thereabouts. I’m almost thirty-five.”
“Well, he looks hundreds of years older—”
“Here! Take care!” Stacey interrupted, stretching out his hand toward the lever, as the car barely grazed by a heavily laden motor-van. “Julie, you’re a public menace!”
“—than you, and he can’t do a thing except play golf.”
Stacey laughed again, this time at Julie’s imperturbable calm. “Everything’s all right, old girl,” he said, “and you needn’t try to apply balm to my bruised heart, though it’s nice of you to want to.”
And they got out, having reached the Prouts’ handsome brick residence, the plans for which Stacey had drawn.
But the maid who opened the door for them followed them into the living-room. “Mis’ Prout,” she announced tragically, “Annie’s going to leave!”
“Is she?” said Julie, drawing off her gloves. “Well, that’s a nuisance. Excuse me a minute, Stacey dear, while I telephone. Go mix yourself a high-ball. You’ll find everything on the sideboard in the dining-room.” And she sat down at a small mahogany desk and opened a tiny cupboard that concealed a telephone.
Stacey obeyed and presently returned with his glass to the living-room, where he listened to his sister call up two employment agencies to make application for a cook, and telephone an advertisement to two newspapers.
“You really are a wonder, Jule!” he said, when she had closed the desk. “Calm and efficient as they make ’em.”
“Oh,” she returned, opening her eyes wide in surprise, “that’s nothing! It happens so often that I should be a silly if I were upset by it now. Perhaps you noticed that I didn’t even have to look the telephone numbers up in the book. Now we can talk.”
But just at this moment the maid returned to announce the visit of a Miss Loeffler, who followed close upon the maid’s heels.
“Hello, Irene,” said Julie pleasantly. “Glad you dropped in. You don’t know my brother, Stacey, do you?”
Miss Loeffler gave Stacey a nod and a brief firm shake of the hand, then threw herself down on the davenport, crossed her legs, and swung the right one vigorously. She looked about twenty-four years old, had dark bobbed hair, a small pretty face with restless dark eyes and a petulant mouth, and wore a brown street suit with a very short skirt.
“Of course I don’t approve of you, Captain Carroll,” she said crisply, “because youareCaptain Carroll, a tool of militarism in the late capitalistic war. No, I’m glad to meet you, but I don’t approve of you.”
“No, you wouldn’t, of course, Irene,” Julie observed placidly.
“Oh, well,” said Stacey, “even pity from you’s more dear than that from another.”
“Naturally, if you quoted any one at me, it would have to be some one hopelessly old-fashioned, like Shelley. Can I have a high-ball, Julie?” she asked, jumping up. All her movements were abrupt, like her voice.
“Of course,” said Julie. “Oh, no, Stacey, don’t try to get it for her. Irene will be cross if you do.”
Nevertheless, he followed Miss Loeffler into the dining-room and at least stood by while she mixed her high-ball.
Suddenly, in the midst of the operation, she turned to him and gazed into his eyes. “What are you really like, Mr. Carroll?” she demanded intensely.
“Awfully orderly,” he replied, reaching out to restrain her hand that held the silver water-bottle. “Can’t bear to see things spilled.”
“Huh!” she said disdainfully.
They went back to the living-room and sat down again.
“See you’ve both been to the wedding,” remarked Miss Loeffler. “You look it. Have a lingering odor of ceremony about you. All very smooth and elegant, I suppose?” And she lighted a cigarette.
Julie was crocheting. “No, Irene,” she said, “you needn’t go around pretending to despise weddings and then come here and try to worm a description of this one out of me. If you wanted to know what it was like you ought to have gone to it and seen for yourself.”
Stacey laughed, as much at his sister’s keenness as at her guest’s eccentricity. But Miss Loeffler was vexed.
“I don’t pretend!” she asserted hotly. “I do dislike weddings. And if I ever want to go and live with a man I shall, without making a silly fuss about it, and then when either he or I get bored we’ll simply break off.”
Julie sighed. “I’m afraid you’ll find it a very nervous wearing life,” she remarked calmly. “I shouldn’t care for it myself, but then I’m—”
“Oh, perfectly hopeless, Julie! You belong back in the eighteen-eighties. What do you think about it, Mr. Carroll?”
“About marriage?” Stacey asked. “Nothing at all. Doesn’t interest me. But I should say you people were at least as Victorian as Julie. You’re quite as excited about the necessity of not having a ceremony as old-fashioned people are about having one.”
Miss Loeffler insisted angrily that this was not true, but presently grew calmer.
“Anyway, you’re right about one thing,” she said, finishing her high-ball, then setting the glass down on the floor and dropping her cigarette end into it. “The whole question’s overstressed. We’ve got other bigger things to think about. Well, I must go. Just dropped in for a minute. See you again soon, Julie. You going, Mr. Carroll? Give you a lift if you are.”
“Thanks,” said Stacey, getting up. He found the girl physically attractive, and he was glad of anything that would keep his thoughts from Marian. He followed her to her handsome run-about, and they set off swiftly.
“Of course,” she said, “I don’t expect to have a car much longer.”
“No?”
“No. When we have Soviets in America I suppose such cars as remain will all be in the service of the public. Of course they may put me to driving one, but more likely I’ll have to cobble shoes or something.”
“And a very good thing, too,” said Stacey. “Pleasant occupation, nice leathery smell, and lots of time to reflect on universal subjects.”
She frowned. “You don’t believe in me at all, do you?” she demanded, looking at him petulantly. “You think we’re all—”
But in her excitement she had pressed her foot on the accelerator instead of the brake, so that they dashed past a policeman who had raised his hand to stop them, swerved madly around the front of a trolley-car that was approaching on the cross street, sent pedestrians flying to left and right, and returned to a normal speed only a hundred yards farther along the avenue, fortunately not crowded, that they were following.
Stacey sighed. “There’s not a pin to choose between you and Julie,” he remarked patiently. “You both try to kill me the same afternoon.”
Miss Loeffler laughed girlishly. “Thatwasstupid of me,” she admitted. “And you were quite the calmest thing I’ve ever seen. But truly,” she went on earnestly, keeping the car, however, at a discreet twelve miles an hour, “it’s serious. You’d be surprised to know how much is stirring deep, deep down right here in Vernon, that you’d think was a positive stronghold of capitalism. Come with me now, will you?” she said eagerly, “and let me show you?”
“Show me what?”
“People who are really thinking, people who get together and see things straight—the social revolution, Bolshevism.”
“Dear me!” said Stacey. “I knew Vernon was no longer provincial, but I had no idea it was so metropolitan as all that.”
“Oh, you can laugh!” she returned darkly, “but you’ll see. Of course you understand we trust your discretion.”
“Of course.”
She turned off from the avenue and stopped the car before an office building. “We meet here,” she announced, “in an ordinary office-room, because it’s so conspicuous that it’s perfectly safe.” And they went up in the elevator.
The large room which they presently entered had been given the semblance of a club. There were numerous easy chairs around the floor, chintz curtains at the windows, and across one end of the room a huge oak table with a vase of flowers and many books and periodicals. Fifteen or twenty people were in the room, some standing, some sprawling in the chairs, two or three perched on the edge of the table. The air was heavy with cigarette smoke.
“Comrade Loeffler!” several voices shouted, as Irene and Stacey entered.
“And with a new comrade in tow!” cried some one.
“Well, he isn’t exactly a comrade,” said Irene. “I just brought him along because he’s so aggravating and skeptical. But he’s perfectly safe. Stacey Carroll, comrades.” And with a proprietary air she drew him over to one end of the room. He rather liked Miss Loeffler. There was something so girlish beneath her pose.
Stacey looked about him idly. All but five of the persons in the room were women. He knew a few of them by sight, and the faces of others were vaguely familiar to him; but he had been away from Vernon for so long and so utterly cut off from it mentally that it was hard for him to remember old acquaintances. Doubtless he had met nearly all these people formerly—he didn’t know. Anyway, they were of a younger generation than he—in the twenties, most of them. He observed that the majority of the women wore their hair bobbed.
“Why so much bobbing of hair, Miss Loeffler? Is it a symbol of freedom?”
“I suppose you might call it that,” she replied, sitting on the arm of his leather chair. “If you were unlucky enough to be a woman you’d appreciate the advantages of wearing your hair short.”
“It’s rather becoming to you,” he observed. “Can’t say I think it is to all of them.”
“It’s stupid and old-fashioned to pay compliments,” she returned coldly. “They don’t interest me at all.”
“Sorry,” said Stacey, “but it’s difficult not to, with all this air of freedom about, and you sitting so close to me.”
She jumped up angrily, but then after a moment defiantly resumed her seat on the arm of his chair.
One of the young men, Comrade Leslie Vane, approached them. He wore a flowing black tie beneath a very low soft collar. Stacey knew him. He was a poet—published things occasionally in the “Pagan” and the “Touchstone”—and the son of John Vane, the big flour man. People in Vernon were very nice about it, but naturally at heart they felt sorry for Mr. Vane, Senior, who was extremely well liked, and rejoiced that at any rate his other son, John, Junior, was normal. Stacey was rather inclined to share Vernon’s point of view in this.
“Hello, Stacey,” said Vane languidly. “Glad to see a militarist with an open mind, anyhow. First example I’ve met with.”
Stacey reflected, as he acknowledged the greeting, that when the Middle-West turned esthetic it became mournfully old-fashioned. Positively Leslie Vane was going back all of twenty-five years in search of a style.
“Sure!” he said. “I’m open to conviction, but what do you want to convince me of?”
“Oh,” drawled Vane, “the papers have all been read; you’re late. There’s only just general talk going on now, but it may do you some good if you’ll listen.”
A little group had gathered around them, and the smoky air became full of words, among which “Soviets,” “proletariat,” and “Bolshevism” predominated.
Stacey, too bored to listen, fell to wondering for a moment about real Bolshevism. He shook his head. No use, that either. He didn’t care if change did come. In a way he would be furiously delighted if order was upset,—things were so silly. But he didn’t believe in any millennium or even in improvement through change. What had the war accomplished?
“—and so that, most of all,” some woman was saying, “is the true lesson of Holy Russia. What do you think of it, Mr. Carroll? Iwon’tcall you Captain.”
He started. “Of Bolshevism? The—er—coming social revolution. Oh, you’ll all be raped, then cut in little pieces, and Comrade Leslie will have his throat cut. Not because Bolshevism is so especially worse than anything else, but because that’s what always happens when any kind of violence gets loose. And, do you know? I don’t care a damn whether it comes or not!”
He meant what he said, as much as he meant anything at all in respect to these futile idiots, but, since there was no passion in his words and his face remained expressionless, his remarks were delightedly deemed a skilful evasion of the question (“My dear, howcouldhe say what he really thought—he a captain and a Carroll?”) and an amusing pleasantry. His bold use of the word “rape,” too, was much appreciated.
But such comments were made after his departure. For neither Miss Loeffler’s physical attractiveness nor conversation with the fashionable followers of Lenin could any longer distract his mind from Marian. She and Ames would be sitting close together now in the drawing-room of a Pullman car. . . .
He escaped from the club and went home.
However, he felt an amused curiosity to know what his sister’s attitude had been toward her impetuous visitor, so he called Julie up on the telephone.
“What do you think about that wild creature that broke in on us to-day?” he asked.
“Irene?” said Julie’s calm voice. “Oh, she’s just a goose, but she’s really quite nice and sweet and young at heart.”
“Yes, that’s what I thought,” he assented. “Occurred to me, though, that I’d better call you up and let you know that she hadn’t eloped with me or done me any real harm—though she nearly ran us into a street-car. Quite a good time.”
“Now, Stacey, listen!” said Julie anxiously. “You won’t go and fall in love with Irene, will you?”
He laughed. “I won’t do anything without asking you about it first, Jule. I lean on you, you know.”
And the odd thing about it was that in a way he did.