“Two little black-birds sitting on a hill,One named Jack and one named Jill.Fly away, Jack!—Fly away, Jill!. . . . . .Come back, Jack!—Come back, Jill!”
“Two little black-birds sitting on a hill,One named Jack and one named Jill.Fly away, Jack!—Fly away, Jill!. . . . . .Come back, Jack!—Come back, Jill!”
“Two little black-birds sitting on a hill,One named Jack and one named Jill.Fly away, Jack!—Fly away, Jill!. . . . . .Come back, Jack!—Come back, Jill!”
“Two little black-birds sitting on a hill,
One named Jack and one named Jill.
Fly away, Jack!—Fly away, Jill!
. . . . . .
Come back, Jack!—Come back, Jill!”
Stacey performed the magic trick over and over again, while Carter searched unavailingly for the birds’ hiding-place, sure that he would find it the next time, and Jack, not understanding but delighted none the less, trotted around tirelessly after his brother, and the November twilight crept in through the windows and darkened the room. Then it was time for the children to go to bed, and Catherine led them away, leaving the two men together.
After a while she came back, and they all three went in to dinner.
Stacey glanced at the table appreciatively. “Phil has one human foible, anyway,” he said to Catherine. “He never cared what he ate, but he’s always been fastidious about how he eats it.”
Catherine gave him a rare smile, that softened her face to beauty. “Do you mean,” she asked, “that all the setting is good, but the dinner itself not?”
He laughed, pleased and surprised at the disappearance of her shyness. “You know I don’t. How can I tell what the dinner’s like when everything’s concealed beneath those heavy silver covers?”
He stayed until very late in the evening. It had always been Catherine’s way to disappear rather early and leave her husband and Stacey to themselves, no doubt because she knew that she had no real part in their intimacy. But to-night, though she went out of the room from time to time, she invariably returned. Indeed, she seemed different to Stacey. It was, he thought, as though one thickness of the veil between them had been stripped away. (Oh, Stacey! Dislike of impressionism?). Once he caught her gazing at him with a melancholy intentness; but, seeing that he was looking, she turned her eyes away at once and stared into the fire.
The war was not mentioned; but, because there was no feverishness in the talk or sense of constraint upon the three, Stacey felt that this revealed no attempt to evade the war and his share in it. The war was there and he was going to it. This was a simple fact, conceded by all three. There was nothing to do about it or say about it. War was not a part of their past or woven anyhow into the fabric of their minds. Not a bit of use for conversation.
“I’ll be down at the boat to-morrow morning,” Phil said, when at last Stacey rose to go.
“Thanks, Phil,” Stacey replied gratefully. “Good night, Catherine, and thank you both—ever so much. I feel—bathed in quiet happiness.”
Catherine gave him her hand, with a murmured good night, then dropped it abruptly.
“Shy once again,” thought Stacey with kindly amusement.
When the next day all good-byes had been said, and the great ship was sweeping out to sea, and Stacey was walking to and fro alone on the deck, with all his thirty years of life vanishing behind him, rounded out, ended, a completed story, while between it and his present self a mist began to rise, like the mist that was rising between ship and shore, he gathered up the impressions the final week had left him—gently, as one ties together old letters before putting them away. And, stripping them down to essentials, he could find but this:—that there was a sweet serenity in the memory of the afternoon and evening with the Blairs, an odd sense of comfort in the picture of Mrs. Latimer stepping towards him beneath the arc-light in front of her house, and—yes—comfort again in the thought of Julie—his sister, Julie, with whom he had never had anything in common save their relationship, but the vision of whose good-humored face, stained with tears, and of whose ridiculous efforts to make her eight-months-old baby say good-bye to Uncle Stacey, recurred to him now gratefully. In the thought of Marian there was only uneasy pain. Perhaps, he reflected sadly, this was just because she had hurt his vanity, or perhaps it was because at such a moment of leave-taking what one demanded was merely simple affection, or perhaps it was because intense love must be uneasy and painful.
Well. . . .
He put the letters away and closed the drawer upon them.
PART I
“Funny! June is June. Permanent sort of thing. Looks, in 1919, ridiculously the same as it looked in 1914.”
So Stacey Carroll reflected idly, as he stepped out into the fresh dusty sunlight from the pier at the foot of West Twenty-Third Street. He wore the uniform of a captain of infantry in the American army, with the red, white and blue ribbon of the D. S. C.
He summoned a taxi with an imperious but economical gesture of the wrist and forefinger, spoke two words to the chauffeur, flung in his bags lightly, and set off for the small hotel on Tenth Street. During the whole of the brief ride he looked out of the window, observantly enough, but he did not appear to be affected one way or another by what he saw. At any rate his face remained impassive until, when he had descended from the taxi and entered the hotel, the clerk at the desk shook his hand and said: “How do you do, Captain Carroll? Glad to see you safely back, sir,” Then Stacey smiled in an odd twisted way that did not make the expression of his mouth more genial or bring any expression at all into his eyes.
In his room he lighted a cigarette, laid it on an ash-tray, and set immediately to unpacking his bags, swiftly, systematically and without haste, pausing only for an occasional puff at the cigarette. Three minutes before he had finished unpacking he turned on the water in the bath-tub. The bath was ready at almost the precise moment Stacey was ready for it. He dressed with the same smooth uninterested efficiency he had shown in unpacking and undressing. Only once did he make any wasteful gesture. This was when, his foot coming in contact with one of the puttees he had laid on the floor, he deliberately kicked the puttee across the room.
Finally, when he had bathed and dressed and everything was put away, Stacey looked in the telephone book, then called up Philip Blair’s number.
“Phil? This is Stacey. . . . Yes. . . . Yes. . . . What? . . . Oh, just now, a few minutes ago! . . . How’s that? . . . Oh, yes, perfectly sound! No wooden leg, no false face, nothing at all! . . . Why didn’t Iwhat? (What the devil’s come over your telephone system?) . . . Oh, write oftener! Well, I did! . . . Yes, of course. ’T’s what I telephoned for. Sure! Be right up.”
Stacey’s voice had been cool and almost expressionless, but his face had softened a little. After he had hung up the receiver he stood for a moment gazing abstractedly ahead of him. Then he put on his hat and went out of the hotel.
But he did not take a motor-bus. Instead, he set off up Fifth Avenue on foot, with an easy sauntering gait that was faster than it looked. It was not at all the way Stacey had walked in 1914. It was more graceful and fluent, revealing a perfect, harmonious and unconscious command of his whole body.
As he walked, he stared about him restlessly; but nothing that he saw disturbed the immobility of his face until he reached the triumphal arch at Madison Square. He gazed at this for some time with a most unpleasant expression indeed, then approached it more closely and read the immortal village names inscribed upon it.
“Oh, damn!” he said, and, walking quickly to the nearest subway station, took a train for Harlem.
Same dingy apartment house, looking a little dingier after five years, same dark elevator, same stuffy hall; and here came Phil and Catherine running down it to meet him. Their eagerness touched Stacey. He did not himself feel eager, though he was glad to see them.
“Well!” cried Phil. “Well! Now how—now what—I mean, whatcana fellow say in these circumstances? Come along! Come on in! Hurry up about it!”
And: “We’re so glad!” said Catherine.
They pushed him into their flat, through the dining-room, into the sitting-room, and plumped him down in an easy chair. A table stood beside it, with a pitcher and glasses. Ice tinkled as the table was jostled.
“Sauterne cup,” Phil explained breathlessly. “ ‘Gather ye rose-buds’ and so forth. Only a short time left, you know. Sole subject of conversation in our great republic. Here! Drink! ‘Drink for your altars and your fires!’ I mean to say: ‘Drink, for once dead you never—’ oh, no, that isn’t it!” And he broke out laughing.
Catherine was calmer, or anyway more static. She had sat down on an ottoman, elbows on knees, chin in hands, and was gazing up at Stacey. But her face, too, glowed with pleasure.
Stacey was smiling faintly. He looked from one to the other and said to himself that they were both just the same as four and a half years since, for all that Phil looked older and more worn and even a little thinner.
“You’re both awfully good to me,” he said.
“We’re awfully noisy!” exclaimed Phil remorsefully, sitting down. “We forget that you’re tired.”
Stacey lit a cigarette. “I’m not tired, Phil,” he remarked. “I never get tired nowadays. Nothing like military service for keeping one fit, you know,” he added drily. “And I’m gladder to see both of you than any other two people in the world.” He spoke with an effort. “You both all right? Everything going well? The children?”
“Out at their aunt’s house in the country,” replied Philip, a look of perplexity coming over his face.
There was a pause.
Then suddenly Catherine spoke, haltingly, with the way she had of being unused to words, but earnestly. “What does it—do to a man, Stacey? As much as—all that?”
He sighed in relief. “Wipes him out, Catherine,” he replied in an emotionless voice. “Replaces him with some one else. Good thing that you saw. Because I couldn’t possibly keep up the bluff. I can’t pretend with you two.”
“Nor with any one else,” said Catherine.
“Nor with any one else.”
Philip laughed. “Well, then,” he declared, “we have with us to-day a brand-new friend!”
But Catherine was clearly going to have things over and done with. “You mean,” she said courageously, “that you’re—glad, a little—to see us, but not—”
“Not the way I ought to be. Only in a vague uneasy dead way. Rotten, isn’t it? And brutal. And bound to hurt your feelings. But what can you expect? If I were to see a man cut in two by a bus on the Avenue I shouldn’t feel anything at all except a little distaste. There you have it. Pretty, isn’t it?”
“But the truth,” said Catherine, her eyes shining.
“Yes,” Stacey admitted. “There’s that to be said for it.”
Philip Blair tugged at his short blond moustache and stared at his friend wistfully. “You don’t hurt me, Stacey,” he said at last. “And it’s not true that you’re not fond of us. If it were true you wouldn’t have been so honest. How do I know what they’ve done to you? You’re all—seared over. Had to be, I suppose, or die. You’ll come back to us. Now tell us about all the outside things. First with the English.”
“I was with them, first as an N. C. O., then as a lieutenant, up to June, 1917. Then I transferred to our—”
“Hold on! Hold on! You got the D. S. O. How?”
“Yes, the D. S. O. On the Somme, at Bazentin-le-Grand, for going out with ten men and cleaning up a machine-gun nest. I transferred—”
“Damn it all!” said Phil, “is that the best you can do with it? How did you do it?”
Stacey shook his head impatiently. “And then,” he went on, “as I said, I transferred to the American army and was made a captain. And I got the D. S. C. ‘for cool leadership and conspicuous bravery in action.’ ”
A sudden change came over Stacey’s face. It woke, as it were, to life—but to sinister life.
“I’ll tell you aboutthat,” he said in a vibrant passionate voice. “I got the D. S. C. for carrying out an order that was sheer murder, for leading my company in a frontal attack against a perfectly worthless position over ground rotten with machine-guns. Not half of my men got off clear. A perfectly worthless position, I tell you, that we retired from next day because it wasn’t possible to hold and wouldn’t have done us any good if we could have held it.”
Well, there was capacity for emotion left in Stacey,—that was clear. Any one’s first impression of him would have been wrong. The question was—capacity for what emotion? A fierce chill intensity glowed in, or perhaps behind, his face. It died down as swiftly as it had kindled.
“What a—what a ghastly blunder!” Philip Blair murmured.
Catherine said nothing.
“That’s what war is,” Stacey replied. “One blunder after another. The side which makes the most blunders loses. A trite thought, but true.”
“Then the Germans made the most?”
“Oh, by far!”
“Strange! For a while they seemed invincible—machine-perfect.”
Stacey lit a fresh cigarette. “It was the legend they threw out. They might have won perhaps if they hadn’t grown to believe in it themselves,” he remarked, almost indifferently.
He laid his cigarette down suddenly and smiled. “Come!” he said, with a hard cheerfulness, “I’ll tell you about something pleasant—the reason I’m here only now, the reason I didn’t get my ‘majority,’ the reason they packed me off to Italy after the Armistice, the one thing I ‘did in the Great War’ that I’ll tell my son about. It was in the Argonne, and I was in command of a battalion—had been for a long time. We were in a fairly isolated position. You know what the Argonne was—woods, lightly held as to numbers by the enemy, careful, oh, so careful, machine-gun nests everywhere! We’d had terrible losses but had plugged on through, little by little. Paused at last. Sat still for about a week. Being bombarded in a desultory fashion, but comfortable enough—comparatively. This was November. Well, on November tenth, in the morning, I learned something that I hadn’t any business to learn,—that the Armistice was coming absolutely. On November tenth at fourP.M.I received orders to attack the position in front of us—sweet little hill, picture-puzzle of machine-guns—at fiveA.M.the next morning, November eleventh—November eleventh! Well, I didn’t do it.”
Stacey’s smile disappeared, and his face took on again that intensity that seemed to reveal the presence within him of some single dark absorbing passion.
“Think of it!” he said. “The cold-blooded futile murder in such orders—given why? How should I know? Because Headquarters didn’t care about going through the red tape of changing their prearranged plans, I suppose. Anyhow,” he concluded, “I didn’t obey. I stood out for once against the machine.”
“What did they do to you when they found out?” and: “Did the soldiers under you know?” cried Phil and Catherine simultaneously.
“Can’t say as to my men. My lieutenants knew. They’d never have split on me. But of course I was found out. There we still were, you see, after the Armistice, which came that very day, in the same position as before. My colonel, a decent fellow for a Regular Army officer, did the least he could under the circumstances—relieved me of my command and sent me as liaison officer to Italy, one being called for about then. Whole thing very quiet. No fuss made. I should think not! Wouldn’t I have loved a fuss? But the fact remains,” he said, “that, having set out to ‘make the world a better place to live in’ (wasn’t that the way my departure was explained?—not at the time, of course; then we were to ‘keep our minds neutral’—but posthumously, after three years) I return, having made it a place, of no matter what sort, for a hundred young men or so still to be alive in. They’d have been rotting in neat little graves but for me. And that’s all. I got demobilized over there—eventually—in Italy, and came back, a free man in spite of the uniform, on the ‘Dante.’ And here I am.”
He leaned back and lit still another cigarette.
“And do you know what people are going to say to you?” asked Catherine in an odd voice. “They’re going to say: ‘Stacey, you smoke too much.’ ”
Suddenly she buried her head in her hands and burst out sobbing.
Both men started, and Philip half rose, then sat down again, pulling his moustache and considering her helplessly. Stacey gazed at her with a kind of grim sadness, as if from an immense distance.
“Forgive me!” she said at last, controlling herself and wiping her eyes. “It—it isn’t because you’re bitter, Stacey,” she went on wearily after a moment, choosing her words with difficulty, “and, oh, not at all because you feel—burned out and unaffectionate. It’s—Phil, you tell him. I can’t talk.”
“It’s because Catherine is tired,” said Phil simply. “With all that you’ve been through, it would be too much to ask you to sympathize with what she’s been through. But, infinitely less than your experience, that’s been a lot, too. She always looked at things squarely—more squarely than I. And what are you going to do when the truth you’re seeking comes marching at you with great steps from a long way off and shows itself a bleak brutal thing?”
Stacey gazed at his friend with intellectual sympathy at least.
Phil went on slowly. “We believed in the war, too. Perhaps not quite so ardently as you, but we believed in it. It seemed, in the big essentials, right against wrong. We were told—oh, you know all the things we were told, the dreams we lived on!”
“I know,” said Stacey.
“All to end in this,—this bitter merciless peace, with all the seeds of new wars in it!”
“Well,” asked Stacey, “when you saw the futile pettiness that revealed itself in men, and the pomposity, and the selfishness, and the greed”—he spat the word out—“did you expect anything better?”
“Not after a while, no,” Phil replied steadily. “At first I did. When I saw the heroism. What happened to the war? A great wrongwasdone. Hundreds of thousands of you went to war nobly to right it. Belgiumwasinvaded, wasn’t it?”
“I don’t remember,” said Stacey. “I suppose so. You touched the truth when you said we ‘went to war.’ What did we go to? Suppose one ant massacred another and you arranged an earthquake to punish it. That’s what happened. You see, a time came,” he continued slowly, an odd dazed look in his eyes,—“about 1916 it began, I should think—when all the surface seemed to have been stripped from life, one layer after another, until there was nothing left showing but universal naked pain. Nothing mattered except this. It was so much bigger than anything else. Belgium didn’t matter. Prussian militarism was a word. Love and hate disappeared, unimportant. Nothing was left but pain.”
Catherine drew a long breath. “And then?” she murmured.
“And then,” he returned, “you went on existing somehow, impersonally, without any emotions—”
“Are you sure?” Phil broke in.
“And without one tattered shred of an illusion left. I made up a story about it once—it must have been in 1916. Imagine a man who has always lived in a house with a roof of beautiful stained glass, and who revels in the soft colors that shine through. One day a tremendous hail storm comes and shatters the glass to fragments and lets the bleak white daylight pour in. Well, at first the man is heart-broken. But, after a little, he thinks: ‘Anyway this is truth. This isreallight. I’ve been living falsely.’ So he bends down to the marble floor to see what has done the damage, but all that he can find is a little pool of dirty water.”
Philip and Catherine stared at Stacey.
The latter shook his head impatiently. “But that’s all past,” he said coolly. “That was 1916. I give you my word that I don’t think about myself at all any more. It’s an effort, trying to. I haven’t any thoughts, and I don’t care a rap for any one, and there isn’t anything I want to do, but I’m jolly well not going to do anything Idon’twant to do. So that’s that!”
Catherine rose. She seemed quite her calm self again. She even smiled. And there was only a slight unsteadiness in her voice when she spoke.
“Oh, no, it isn’t, Stacey!” she said. “You don’t want to stay to dinner with us, but you’re going to, all the same.”
He laughed. “All right,” he assented.
“I wish,” thought Stacey nervously, when, on the afternoon of the next day but one, his train, slowing down, was passing through the suburbs of Vernon, “I wish that old things would either die outright or else live.”
For there in the distance crept by, on its hill, the Endicott School, where he had gone as a boy; here was a sudden glimpse of the Drive, where he had often motored with Marian. And old emotions stirred feebly within him like ghosts of their dead selves. He did not want them; they annoyed him. They had nothing to do with Stacey Carroll, 1919. They made him conscious of himself, that he had a self.
They were worse than anything he felt at sight of the small crowd which awaited him as the train swept into the station. Amusement submerged all other feelings then.
“Good Lord!” he exclaimed, “the conquering hero!”—and plunged down into the tumult.
There was his father, his face rigid with repressed emotion, his hand shaking Stacey’s vigorously. And there were half a dozen of his old friends standing back to let the family have free play. And here was his sister, Julie, fatter than in 1914, laughing and crying and kissing him and trying to talk all at once, while her pleasant-faced husband, Jimmy Prout, smilingly held out a hand across her shoulder and managed to grasp one of Stacey’s fingers.
Did they really care so much as all this for him? Stacey wondered, with remorse at feeling so little himself. Or was it just the dramatic moment?
Then all at once his coolness was swept away by a gust of genuine emotion, the last he should have felt—anger and something like horror. For Julie had bent over and lifted high her five-year-old son, and the child had on a tiny khaki uniform and was saluting his uncle solemnly, fingers stiffly touching his over-seas cap.
“For God’s sake, Julie!” cried Stacey, his face white.
The proud smile suddenly vanished from his sister’s face. She stared at him in hurt surprise. “What’s the matter, Stacey?” she stammered. “Don’t you like him? Don’t you like Junior?”
“Of course I like him!” he muttered. “It’s just the uniform. Don’t put it on him, Julie.” He swung the boy up in his arms. “Don’t salute, old fellow!” he said, sweeping off the little cap from the blond curls. “Give us a kiss!”
“Oh, I thought you’d like it!” said Julie wretchedly. “I trained him so carefully to salute.”
“It’s all right, old girl!” said Stacey, putting the child down. His wave of emotion had disappeared. He was vaguely sorry to have hurt his sister’s feelings.
Other people had crowded up. The station rang with greetings. But, through the insistent pressure forward of Mr. Carroll, Senior, who had hold of his son’s arm, Stacey presently found himself at the waiting motor car, into which the train porter (thanks to Jimmy Prout’s directions) had piled Stacey’s bags.
“Good-bye for now,” said Julie, giving her brother another kiss. “We’re going to take Junior home, but we’ll be out at dad’s for dinner.”
And Stacey was in the tonneau of his father’s car, with only his father by his side. The car moved off.
Mr. Carroll drew a long breath. “Ouf!” he exclaimed. “So you’re back at last, son!” he said, after a moment.
“Back at last. Deuce of a long time, isn’t it?”
Mr. Carroll nodded gravely. “Longer than any one can imagine. I’ve missed you terribly, Stacey.”
The young man found himself wondering. Was it true? Was affection a real and vivid thing? He, Stacey, had had his life, such as it was, in these four years and a half. He had not missed his father, save in a mild way now and then. Well, his father, too, had had his own life. His days must have been taken up with business. He must have dined out frequently in the evenings or have had people to dinner. Had his thoughts truly clung to Stacey? Wasn’t it all half a convention? Between a child, helpless, appealing, undeveloped, and a father, protective, tender, apprehensive of a thousand infant dangers,—there, indeed, was a poignant relationship! Afterward?
Not that Stacey was not fond of his father. He was fond of him even now, but without pretence, decoration or melodrama. And, though he pursued these idle thoughts in a cool detached way, he was not quite cool, not quite detached. “You don’t look a day older, dad,” he said.
“No? I ought to. I feel older—or did till just now.” Mr. Carroll scrutinized his son’s face affectionately. “Youlook older, son,” he continued, “older in a good sense—grown up, surer of yourself. It’s made a man of you.”
Except for a faint sense of irony, this estimate produced no impression at all on the young man. He was simply not interested in the subject. However, his father pursued it pleasantly.
“Looking you over, five years ago, a business man would have said: ‘Charming boy, young, fresh, eager, full of ideas, but something of a dreamer.’ To-day he’d think: ‘There’s a strong man that I could put at the head of a big company’.”
“Careful, sir!” said Stacey. “Remember that anything you say may be used against you. I might take you up on that.”
A sudden gleam shone in Mr. Carroll’s eyes. “You mean that?” he demanded.
His son laughed. “Don’t really know yet. Maybe.”
“Not going back into architecture? Not enough fight in it now, eh? Want something more vigorous.”
“Well,” said Stacey, “I’m not going back into it, architecture, at once, anyway. Want to look around a bit first. Can’t say that I really know what my reasons are.”
His answer was strictly truthful. He did not know his reasons—except that he literally couldn’t have drawn plans for so much as a barn.
His father nodded, then, catching sight of a man who was walking briskly along the sidewalk of the street down which the car was gliding, told the chauffeur to stop, and, leaning out, called: “Colin! Oh, Colin!”
It was Colin Jeffries, president of the smelting works, president of the power plant, vice-president and dictator of the great linseed oil mills, head of a dozen corporations, donor to the city of its art gallery and public library, Vernon’s first citizen. A man of fifty-five, vigorous, keen-eyed, clean-shaven but for a short dark moustache. Not at all like Mr. Carroll in features. As like him as one pea to another in expression.
“My son, Colin. Captain Carroll. You remember him. Just got back. Wanted you to shake hands with him. D. S. C.—‘for cool leadership and conspicuous bravery in action.’ ”
“I know,” said Mr. Jeffries, shaking Stacey’s hand warmly and gazing straight into his eyes. “Glad to see you back, my boy. Very genuinely glad. Congratulations aren’t much, but you have them. We older men, who couldn’t go, aren’t going to forget what you young men did.”
“Thanks,” said Stacey, considering him coolly. It occurred to him that it was quite right of Mr. Jeffries to be grateful, since one thing the young men had done was to make him considerably richer than formerly. However, Stacey did not think this with any bitterness, or accuse the millionaire of a self-interested patriotism or of anything else. He was simply no longer—as he had once been—impressed by the legend of the man. He merely scrutinized him coldly from outside and reserved judgment.
“There’s another reason we’re glad to have you back,” Mr. Jeffries was saying gravely. “You young men have saved the country from one danger. We count on you to save it from another. You’ll find probably that you’ve got to keep on saving it. Conditions are chaotic. The country’s full of social unrest. You’ll see.” (Mr. Carroll nodded assent emphatically.) “Malignant forces are at work secretly. It’s you boys of the American Legion who will be the greatest factor for good in the country’s life for the next generation. Rest? You won’t find rest. Do you want it?”
“Not particularly, Mr. Jeffries,” Stacey replied calmly.
“Good! Good luck to you!”
“Fine man, Colin!” Mr. Carroll observed, as the car moved off again. “A great citizen and a true friend. Not a stain on his reputation.”
Stacey did not contradict the assertion, even inwardly. He merely reserved judgment and was not especially interested in what the result of it would be. The only positive comment he passed (to himself) was that Mr. Jeffries talked rather like an orator on a platform.
“Oh, by Jove!” exclaimed Mr. Carroll suddenly, “I completely forgot! Selfish of me! Marian called me up and asked me to tell you that she wouldn’t expect you to-night—said she realised the family had first rights to you—but would look for you to-morrow afternoon, three-thirty. Considerate of her, though hard on you perhaps. Nice girl, Marian, very! Showed uncommon good sense in not coming to the station.”
But Mr. Carroll would have been dismayed had he known the effect his apologetic explanatory remarks produced upon his son. They weighed Stacey down. For it is the extraordinary truth that not once since Stacey descended from the train had the thought of Marian crossed his mind, and that to have it recalled to him now was burdensome.
However, he recovered quickly from the sudden feeling of depression. For, being totally without any scheme of life, he lived from day to day and met problems only as they arose. Marian was to-morrow’s problem. He shook it off.
“Thank you,” he said. “It’s right of her. Of course I want this evening at home with you.”
But when finally they were at home Stacey and his father found little to say to each other. Mr. Carroll was full of the nervous restlessness of repressed affection, bustled about, made his son a cocktail (which Stacey drank with relish), and finally threw himself down in a chair and lit a cigar, though it was close to dinner time.
Stacey was more self-possessed, though he could not be entirely self-possessed in this house where all the edges of things and thoughts were blurred by memories out of childhood. He was able to recognize clearly, with no more than a touch of sadness, that at bottom he and his father had little in common. Stacey felt that he ought to be expansive, communicative, but he simply could not be. Besides, he had nothing to communicate.
Yet, if Stacey revealed no characteristic for which he may be loved, he did reveal one for which he may be admired:—self-control. For when his father asked him, almost shyly, about the action in which he had won his American decoration, Stacey told the story of it, quietly, artistically, handsomely, with even a smile on his lips, as one might tell the story of Thermopylæ or Bunker Hill, while all the time his eyes, that gazed off across his father’s shoulder, were seeing the unendurable picture of the real thing. It was an achievement.
When the tale was finished the older man drew a long breath. “By Jove!” he exclaimed in a low voice, mingled admiration and envy showing in his face. “To live through moments like those! Wonderful! Moments you’ll never forget!”
But Stacey, who had risen and was leaning against the empty fire-place, gave an odd sound like a strangled laugh. He crossed the room to a tall window, flung it wide open, and surreptitiously wiped a drop of perspiration from his forehead. Then he turned back.
“Make me another cocktail, dad,” he said. “Do! We couldn’t get gin like that in Italy.”
It was a relief to Stacey when Julie and her husband arrived. For he craved of his sister now precisely what had irked him in her formerly—her apparent absence of any inner life and her absorbed occupation with externals. If any one had protested that she probably did have an inner life he would have assented cheerfully. He simply did not want to know about it or about any one else’s.
The Prouts were a little late (Julie was always a little late) and Mr. Carroll, who had been fidgeting with increasing exasperation, greeted his daughter wrathfully.
“Confound it, Julie! Can’t you be on time for once in a way? Isn’t it as easy to get here at seven as at seven-ten?”
“Well, now, daddy, it wasn’t my fault,” said Julie, her voice and eyes full of hurt innocence, while her husband grinned. “I was all ready and then at the very last moment—”
“Pshaw!” her father interrupted. “If only you wouldn’t always have an excuse! Come on in! Everything will be cold, of course.”
And such things put Stacey in good humor. Indeed, among them he enjoyed himself more than later when the first two courses had been served and his father was ready for conversation.
“Poor Jimmy!” Julie was saying. “Hewasso unhappy not to get across! After he’d gone through officers’ training camp they sent him to Camp Grant and just kept him there the whole time. He was so mad, weren’t you, Jimmy?”
“Well,” said her husband pleasantly, “itwasa good deal of a bore to go through all that training and then never have a chance to use it.”
“Oh, it’ll come in handy for the next war,” Stacey observed.
“Oh, Stacey!” his sister cried, “you don’t think there’s going to be another!”
Stacey laughed. “I was only trying to comfort you, Julie. Thought from the way you spoke you’d like to give Jimmy a chance. Just think of it!—there he’d be on a big white horse, waving his sword and charging the enemy, with all his men following him and cheering madly! Wouldn’t you like that?”
Jimmy grinned at his brother-in-law, but Julie shook her head soberly, though perhaps she was only playing at being as ingenuous as all that.
“No,” she said firmly, “I wouldn’t. Jimmy plays a good game of golf, but he’s no use at all on a horse—never was. And I think it would be nice enough—now—for him tohavegot across andhavehad a medal, like you, Stacey dear, so that I could say: ‘I don’t think you’ve met my husband, Mrs. Jones. You see, he’s been in France for two years. Oh, yes, D. S. C.,ofcourse!’—but at the time I never did want him to go, not for a minute.”
The two young men laughed again. Stacey considered his sister’s point of view human, straightforward and sensible. Where was the good, he wondered swiftly, in going through a lot of complicated emotions, since, if you were honest, you always ended in just such simplicity? It was a lot better to be simple in the first place and stay so.
But Mr. Carroll, who was in the midst of a swallow of claret, gulped suddenly, choked, and set his glass down with a bump. “That,” he said angrily, “is about as silly and weak and unpatriotic as anything I’ve ever heard even you say, Julie!”
“I can’t help it, dad,” Julie returned meekly. “It’s the way I really feel.”
“Then you should keep still about it. Nice sort of part we should have played in the war if every wife had taken that attitude!”
Stacey, who thought his sister was being badly scolded for no reason at all, gave her a sly friendly smile, at which her face brightened. She recovered so quickly, indeed, and her husband had shown, throughout, such absence of any discomfort, that Stacey concluded Julie must be inured to this sort of harshness. He tried to remember whether his father had always been so sharp with her, but couldn’t.
“Jimmy would have had his chance, no doubt,” Mr. Carroll remarked, “if the war had lasted a few months longer, as it should have.” He frowned. “I believe,” he went on solemnly, “that the Armistice will prove to be the biggest disaster the world has ever known.” And he looked about him fiercely.
The first time that Stacey had heard this sentiment expressed (at tea, in Rome, at the house of an elderly American gentleman whom every one cultivated because he mysteriously always had butter and sugar), he had first felt genuine horror, and then immediately had flown into a white ungovernable rage during which he said things that had reduced the kindly old gentleman, who was used to having every one pleasant, to a state of helpless trembling discomfort. However, by now Stacey was growing used to the sentiment (it had been mentioned, for instance, on the boat, and the smoking-room of the Pullman car had rung with it). It no longer produced in him any emotion save a weary scorn.
“I’d like to have seen the Huns get a taste of their own medicine,” Mr. Carroll continued, his eyes gleaming beneath their heavy white eyebrows. “Only a month or two more of the war and they’d have seentheirsoil invaded,theirtowns in flames, and the Allies would have marched into Berlin. Now hear them talk! They don’t know they’re beaten!”
“I dare say they suspected it when they handed over their fleet,” said Stacey calmly.
“You don’t agree with me, son?” Mr. Carroll exclaimed.
Stacey shook his head. “It would have cost thousands of lives more,” he remarked, helping himself to almonds.
“Not so many! Not so many!” his father insisted.
“Some,” said Stacey. “However,” he added in a dry voice, “to do our leaders justice, I don’t think they gave that point undue importance. The truth was we’d have had to pause pretty soon, anyway. Our troops were fagged, our lines of communication were impossibly long, and we’d shot off most of our ammunition. A pause would have given the Germans a chance to fall back on a nice short line all prepared for them, and it would have taken another tremendous battle to break through again,—and there was winter already upon us.”
Mr. Carroll had followed his son’s words attentively. “Well, of course,” he said, “that’s different. I’m not a military man and I don’t pretend to have become an expert strategist, like most of my friends at the club. They’ll amuse you, Stacey. All the same, it’s an outrage that the Germans should get off scot-free.”
And after this the subject of the war was dropped for a while.
Julie related personal gossip agreeably, and Jimmy Prout told an amusing story about an eccentric client of his, and Stacey listened with interest to both of them, but he observed that his father did not listen. Mr. Carroll did pay his son-in-law a perfunctory semblance of attention, but he made no pretence of even hearing what his daughter said. And he cut short her account of a country club feud with a sudden irrelevant remark accompanied by an impatient frown.
“We passed Colin Jeffries on the way home, Jimmy,” he said, “and stopped to speak with him. He said a few words to Stacey about the rottenness of conditions over here to-day, about what we’ve all got to face.”
Jimmy’s good-humored countenance became sober. He nodded. “Yes,” he said, “it’s pretty fierce.”
But Mr. Carroll had turned again to his son. “The whole country’s full of social unrest,” he went on angrily. “You’ve no idea, Stacey. All the lazy worthless Have-Nots are up in arms against the Haves, and our damned government pets them and plays right into their hands. Not a bit of respect for the men who’ve made the country what it is. You’ll see.”
“I’ve seen something of it abroad,” Stacey remarked. “What do you expect? You have four years and a half of universal war positively guaranteed to turn the world into heaven, and then it ends with the world even less heavenly than before. Of course you get unrest.”
He had spoken idly enough, without much thought as to what he said, save that he exercised care not to plunge into the question truly, but he was not really apathetic; he was curious about the intensity of feeling his father displayed.
“No, but I’m talking about definite, concrete, unjustifiable demonstrations of unrest,” Mr. Carroll continued, shaking off generalities. “Here you have labor, the one real profiteer in the war, getting more and more, more than it ever got, far more than its share, yet always increasing its demands, always doing less work. Why, it takes three men nowadays to get through a piece of work that one man could do a few years ago. Bolshevism! Sheer Bolshevism!”
Julie bravely ventured a remark. “You remember Harry Baird, Stacey?” she said, with a little laugh. “He’s a contractor, you know. Well, he says that nearly all his men drive up to work in their own Fords.”
Stacey laughed, too, though he kept his eyes on his father’s face. Mr. Carroll seemed to have relapsed into his former state of indignant meditation.
“Now I ask you,” Julie concluded, “what moredothey want?”
“Why,” Stacey observed lightly, “they probably want to drive up in Packards. You see, if you’ve had power—that is to say, if you’ve had money—for a long time, you don’t much care whether you ride around in a Packard or a Ford—”
“Oh, I care!” Julie broke in. “A Ford is awfully jolty.”
“Yes, you care because one is more comfortable. What I mean to say is that a Packard isn’t to you a belligerent symbol that you’re as good as anybody else. I dare say it is to the laborer.”
But Mr. Carroll had emerged from his thoughts and was looking at Stacey keenly. “Son,” he said soberly, “you’ve done your duty heroically. You’ve gone through a tremendous ordeal and you’ve gone through it without flinching. Don’t go back on what’s right now, will you? Keep on going straight. Don’t let yourself get infected with Bolshevism. You’re not, are you?”
Stacey considered his father thoughtfully and with a faint but genuine sadness—almost the only touch of a soft emotion he had felt since his arrival. For, though his remarks to Julie had been careless and superficial, they had just grazed the outside of something in which he really believed, as much as he believed in anything. And it was precisely these remarks which had alarmed Mr. Carroll. Stacey could not make his father out, and still less did he make himself out, but, whatever his father was, and whatever he himself was, it was clear that an impassable gulf lay between them. They had nothing in common save affection and memories.
Therefore, when he answered his father, he did so as gently and circumspectly as the truth (his one remaining god) would permit; which was rare, since in general he was careless enough of others’ feelings.
“Why, no, dad,” he said slowly, smiling at his father, “I don’t believe I’m tainted with Bolshevism. I know almost nothing about it and don’t trust what I do know. Propaganda for, propaganda against,—that’s all we’re getting; not facts. In so far as I can make out the theory I don’t like it—too crushing for the individual. What we want is more individualism than before the war, not less. But I think it’s a mistake to hate a word, because hate reveals fear. One ought not to be afraid of anything. Now you’ve probably got all kinds of unrest over here, just as everywhere else. Some of it, I dare say, is right, some wrong—mere abuse of power. Well, nobody ever yet had power without abusing it. The teachers in your schools, the professors in your colleges, the salaried clerks in your offices, are restless, poor things! as well as the laborers in your factories and the men who deliver your coal. What I’m trying to say is that these are all different kinds of restlessness. Don’t go and lump them together and give them a name and then shudder or get angry at it. You’re drilling your enemies that way, handing them out a uniform, and urging a lot of your friends to join them.”
“There’s a lot in what you say, Stacey,” said Jimmy Prout. “We’ve enough enemies without adding to them unnecessarily. I’m all for the school teachers myself.”
As for Mr. Carroll, he had sat silently gnawing at his gray moustache during Stacey’s discourse, and he remained, now that it was over, still appearing to reflect upon it. But at the sound of a sharp pop behind him he started, shook his head as though to rid himself of troubles, and watched the champagne being poured into his glass.
“Good!” he cried, with a smile that softened his firm handsome face, and rose to his feet. “Here’s to Stacey, D. S. O., D. S. C., and my son! Thank God, he back’s home again, with his duty accomplished!”
The evening, pleasant as it was, left Stacey with a feeling of emptiness. When he had finally said good night to his father and gone upstairs to his own study he wandered about it restlessly, smoking cigarettes and staring blankly at one after another of the objects with which he had once affectionately filled it. Everything and every one, he said to himself, were just the same—or almost. It was inconceivable. He had gone through something that had destroyed every particle of his former self, and now he came back to just what he had left. Not, he reflected, that he wanted his people changed, certainly not in the way he was changed—whatever that was. What the devil did he want?
Well, for one thing, he would rather like to be able to feel a little more. Toward Phil and Catherine Blair, for example. He knew that he had treated them badly. What sort of gratitude had he returned them for their open-hearted welcome? He shrugged his shoulders. He couldn’t help it. It was all he had felt.
Nevertheless, even though only intellectually, he was sorry. And all at once he found something he could do about it, and felt immediate relief. To do something had become his sole means of relief in any situation. He sat down at the desk in his study and drew out paper and ink.
Then he paused for a moment, reflecting. Of course he might be mistaken about it. Phil might be prospering. He remembered that he hadn’t even asked. But he shook his head. No, the signs were clear enough. And, if he was mistaken, it would anyway do no harm to write. He dashed off the brief letter at once, never pausing for the best word or expression.