PART II
It was afternoon on the last day of December when Stacey arrived at the little station of Pickens, North Carolina. His face had a sunken ravaged look, and grime from the repulsively dirty train made its underlying pallor ghastly. But Stacey was not really in any such abject condition as he appeared to be. He was worn out, beaten back at every point, but something in him still hung on; his eyes were tired but alive. In the train, which was crowded, as only a branch-line train of the Southern Railway can be crowded, with commercial travellers and with slovenly mothers publicly nursing crying children much too old to be nursed either publicly or privately, he had listened with even a little amusement to talk of how much better the service would be as soon as the government turned the road back to the company; and his will to get away by himself, out of touch with men and women, was strong and intense, sustaining him. He was not repelled by the sordid ugliness of the station and the glimpse of Main Street, but felt rather an unemotional sense of home-coming, which any native of Pickens would have attributed to the fact that Stacey’s mother’s people, though now all dead or widely scattered, had been the Pickens Barclays, but which more likely arose in Stacey because the end of his quest was in sight.
Anyway here came old Elijah, grinning broadly, hat in hand, his fringe of white hair blowing about his nearly bald black head. He shook Stacey’s hand vigorously.
“I shuah almos’ thought you wasn’t on that theah train, Mistuh Stacey,” he declared. “Theah didn’ seem nothin’ but babies.” And he carried Stacey’s bag across the platform to a buggy.
“Hello!” said Stacey, “you’re driving Duke! What will Mr. Carroll say to that, Elijah?”
“Well, Mistuh Stacey, suh, I jes’ had to get you home somehow. These heah Fohds at the garage, jes’ as like as not they get stuck on the Meldrun road. I wouldn’ have drove Duke ’cept foh that. It’s been rainin’ a powehful lot.”
“Haven’t they mended that road yet?” Stacey inquired, getting into the buggy.
“No, suh, not yet. You stop that, Duke, suh!” he called to the horse, who, impatient of the shafts, was curveting sideways down the street.
Two or three people came up to the buggy and shook Stacey’s hand, and he replied to their greetings as heartily as he could; but he was eager to be rid of them, and felt relief when presently the town was left behind and the buggy was ploughing through the waste of red mud known as the Meldrun road. He lit a cigarette and leaned back in the seat, drawing in deep breaths of the damp chilly air, and letting Elijah’s words run on unchecked and unheeded.
The landscape was a sweet and pleasant one even now in winter when the oaks and the poplars were bare of leaves. The rolling brick-colored fields, planted with corn, were interspersed with patches of woods, where hills rose, blue with spruce and dark green with white pine. Beyond were the low friendly mountains. Log cabins were scattered about here and there, with pigs, dogs and ragged children playing indiscriminately before them. All the people Stacey met or passed on the road raised their hats gravely, and Stacey raised his in return. He was enough of this country, and also sufficiently intelligent, to have no sentimental northern fancies about its romantic aristocracy. He had no more illusions about the people of Pickens than about the people of Vernon. If the latter were vulgar, the former were bigoted. There greed took on gigantic forms; here it revealed itself in petty ways. Here, as there, he thought, it was the one permanent human instinct. He did not know what labor conditions were now at the knitting mills; he knew what they had been six years ago, the last time he had been down, and he was skeptical of any change. Yet the sight of people here bothered him less than in Vernon, it seemed. That, he thought idly, was because here the inhabitants were more a part of their country, stood out less blatantly against the landscape, blended with it—or almost. Not because they and it were picturesque, but because they had belonged to their country for many generations, whereas in Vernon nobody had been molded by continuous residence into harmony with anything. And Stacey reflected that only in rural New England and the South did you get this impression of harmony between landscape and people, as though they had mutually made one another. Really they were at bottom very alike, rural New England and the South, though each would have been shocked at the idea. Each with a continuous past from which it had sprung, to which it belonged. A tight, narrow, little past, but authentic.
Stacey was roused from meditation by a sense that Elijah had been saying the same words a great many times, and that the words were a question.
“How’s that, Elijah?” he asked.
“I was jes’ sayin’, Mistuh Stacey, as how I reckoned you’d be wantin’ some colohed girl to cook foh you an’ make youah bed?”
“No,” said Stacey calmly, “I don’t want any one. You’ll do that, Elijah.”
The old man grew melancholy. “Shuah, Mistuh Stacey, if you say so,” he replied sadly. “I’ll wohk myself to the bone foh you, but I jes’ don’ know if I positively got the time to do everythin’ jes’ right. I got a powehful lot to do, Mistuh Stacey.”
“What is it, Elijah?”
“Well, I got to look afteh Duke, suh, an’ then theah’s all that big place to see to.”
“A couple of men working on it, aren’t there?”
“Yes, suh, but that’s jes’ it. They don’ wohk ’less’n I stan’s oveh them all the time.”
“They probably don’t work if you do. I don’t want a maid, Elijah. You can hire a woman to come in and clean for a couple of hours in the morning, but I don’t want to see her.”
“Yes, suh,” said the negro, in a tone of aggrieved resignation. But he got over it almost at once, with quick forgetfulness, and was presently babbling on as before.
When at last they approached the Carroll property Stacey looked about him more attentively, with a wistful sense of what was past, such as one might feel in reading over old letters, full of youthful affection, to some one all but forgotten now.
The house, three miles distant from the town, was low and rambling, with deep verandahs and numerous sleeping-porches. It sat on a knoll among ten acres of sloping lawn and perhaps ninety of oak and pine woods; and from its front verandah one looked away, west, for miles up a narrowing valley between tree-clad mountains. “Valley Ridge,” Stacey remembered, half humorously, half painfully, Julie had tried to call the place in her boarding-school days, and had come down one Christmas vacation with heavy blue stationery embossed in silver with that legend; at which their father had remarked that if she ever used any of that “Princess Alice abomination” he’d get some pink paper for himself, have “The Pig Sty” engraved for a heading, and write letters on it to the principal of Julie’s school.
It was odd, Stacey thought, that the recollection of this trivial incident should remain in his mind as something touching, more touching than the memory of really emotional events—his mother’s death, for instance. How things clung—the absurdest things! One could never get rid of them. They were like tattered cobwebs in corners.
But they had reached the end of the driveway by now, and Stacey sprang out.
After supper he sat, huddled in an overcoat, on the wide front verandah of the house. The low mountains, only a mile to the north, were hazy blue in the twilight. Later the moon rose, and soft brightness spread over everything. Straight ahead the narrow valley took on shimmering pearly tints, range after luminous range of mountains intersecting its sides, like filmy theatre-drops in a stage setting.
In the midst of this pale silence a sense of reposefulness came over Stacey. It did not spring from any achieved harmony. He had harmonized nothing. He had, as he was perfectly aware, merely bolted. And nothing that he had felt was gone. His pain at Phil’s death, his compassion for Catherine, his hatred of men, his resentment at this rag of a world,—all this and everything was still alive within him, but submerged beneath his isolation. When he thought of men he still thought of them as greedy beasts of prey; but it was possible for him now, he believed, not to see them and be one of them.
At last, when it had grown very late, he went up to the bed Elijah had made for him on a sleeping-porch, from which, too, he had the same view of the shining valley; and so fell asleep.
And now began for Stacey as solitary a life as that of any medieval hermit. Every morning he went out on Duke for a fifteen- or twenty-mile ride over mountain roads and paths, returning splashed with mud and frequently drenched through, for the season was exceptionally rainy. And after the late cold luncheon which he trained Elijah to leave spread out for him, he would set off again, on foot, for the woods.
The letters that came for him he tossed unopened into the library desk, except those from his father and Catherine. Theirs he read, but hastily, and replied to them with an effort. He did not so much mind reading or even answering Mr. Carroll’s; he did so almost mechanically. But Catherine’s were different. Matter-of-fact and never touching on general ideas, they were yet, in some cool way, intimate, and certainly without the shyness that had always hampered Catherine in talking to Stacey. It was as though in these letters she assumed that he was real, as he felt that she was. And this was painful to him, dragging him back into the world from which he had fled. Writing to her was hard, and he was aware that his letters must be dull. But Catherine did not write often—only once every two or three weeks.
Stacey also read a letter from Julie. But Julie was a poor correspondent, writing, when positively forced to, in an odd stilted manner quite uncharacteristic of her pleasant self. Only this one effort came from her; but Stacey would not have minded fifty letters as unreal. The postscript, however, did sound like Julie, and brought Stacey back for a moment to Vernon. “How did Irene know where you were when Phil was dying?” it demanded. Oh, so it was Irene who had told Julie, and Julie Catherine, that he was at Clarefield! He stared ahead of him, recalling the tragedy; then laid Julie’s letter among the others in the desk drawer.
A few people called on Stacey, and he was polite enough to them; but he never returned their visits, and soon no one troubled him further. It was a difficult matter to drive out from town through all that mud. When, rarely, he did talk with people he received an impression that they were literally very far off. Their voices seemed to reach him from a distance, or deadened as though through a barrier of fog. It was like conversation in a dream.
Sometimes on his rides he would get so far away or be caught in so terrific a storm that he would stay over night in some mountaineer’s cabin. On these occasions he was welcomed with a grave courtesy unmarred by apologies for what his hosts had to offer. The cabin invariably had but one room and a lean-to. Supper over, the women would go to bed, while the master of the house and Stacey smoked their pipes outside. Then the two of them would enter, undress in the dark, and lie down together. It did not irk Stacey to be with these people. They seemed apathetic and emotionless, and their eyes had an abstracted look.
On the other hand, if human feeling had faded in him, his long neglected fancy was waking to new life. His mind grew, like an enchanted wood, into a tangle of imaginings, that gave him sometimes a feeling of release, a lifting sense of delight. Similes flitted through it rapidly. A cloud shadow on a blue mountain was like a veil flung across the face of a goddess, heightening her loveliness. The sudden sound of a brook in the forest was like shy laughter. What was laughter? Something delicately unhuman, perhaps, an expression of the youthful buoyant relation between earth’s creatures and the earth. Biologists said that animals could not laugh. Idiotic! It was only animals and children that could laugh. A dog laughed. Even Duke could laugh. It was true that cats could not, but this was because they were not primitive animals, but civilized. Men did not laugh. They smirked or—or—ricanaient. Stacey could not think of the English word and indolently did not try to.
He noted with calm contempt this revival of fancifulness in himself, saying that he had reverted to the sentimentalism of his early life. For all along he was contemptuous of himself for his surrender. Further than this he would not look. He avoided himself as persistently as he avoided others.
Yet in his reading he did not turn to poetry and romance. He read Tolstoy, Samuel Butler and Thomas Hardy. He cared, in fact, for no books that did not treat solely and squarely of men’s relations to one another. He would have nothing to do with men; he would read of nothing else.
Months passed, with Stacey scarcely aware of their smooth succession. He was like a man asleep, vaguely dreaming. But itwasonly a sleep, a semi-conscious state into which one sinks, however pleasantly, when tired. Even in those moments when his fancy played delightedly over some sudden glimpse of beauty he was at bottom dissatisfied—like a man struggling achingly in a dream to enfold and make real the unsubstantial vision of his mistress.
By this time April had come. The Judas trees had burned themselves out, the fresh pale green of oaks and maples shimmered against the dark green of the pines, the forests were white with dog-wood blossom, and on the lower mountain slopes masses of flame azalea made the ground beneath the trees appear on fire. Much of Stacey’s present calm came through his freedom from men; but much, too, from the silent satisfaction of his starved sense of beauty. He read less now and went on longer rides.
But his calm was insecure. Something impetuous fluttered within him, too strong for this life of fancy. Mentally he was still isolated; physically he was restless, stirred tumultuously by the spring, called to union with the warm thrilling life all about him.
About a quarter of a mile from Stacey’s house lay the village of Meldrun, straggling along one side of a small river, which, having flowed prettily through the Carroll property, its steep banks massed with rhododendrons, issued thence into practical life, like a business man after a condescending hour with the arts. It fell, that is, into rapids, the water power from which was utilized by a small hosiery factory. Around this plant had grown up the village, consisting of a company store and of some fifty incredibly abject huts, leaning at strange angles, propped up anyhow, when in acute danger of collapse, by logs; the effect of the whole like that of a Vorticist picture.
The beginning of many of Stacey’s rides led him perforce through this ignoble place. The brick factory itself stood close beside the road he must follow, on a narrow strip of ground between it and the river, and through the broken glass of its windows slovenly girls leered out at him or shouted uncomplimentary remarks, and he could see the pale, hard-featured faces of ten- and twelve-year old children. If Stacey was walking Duke, he would wave his hat as he passed, but mostly he went through the town at a gallop. He rode well, and with his impassive, rather stern face, he must have looked like some callous medievalcondottiere. No one in Meldrun would have heard ofcondottieri, but the effect would be the same.
Really, however, Stacey was far from impassive. This misery of which he caught a glimpse troubled him profoundly,—the more since, so far as he could see, there was nothing he could do about it. Yet, oddly, he rode through Meldrun oftener than he needed to.
The house of the factory owner, a Mr. Langdon, stood on the crest of a low hill some distance back to the left just before the village began; on one side its grounds adjoined the Carroll property. It was an imposing pillared mansion built as a plantation house before the Civil War, but Stacey gazed across at it grimly each time that he rode out through Meldrun. However, he did not see what he could do about this, either. He tried to dismiss both house and village from his thoughts.
Mr. Langdon himself, a pleasant-faced elderly man with a young wife and three small daughters, he knew by sight and nodded to curtly when they happened to meet. But, for all his deliberate isolation, he had been unable not to pick up a few scraps of gossip here and there, and also there was Elijah, an unquenchable fountain of information. So Stacey learned that the Langdons were a South Carolina family; that they had formerly owned the house and a thousand acres round about—the whole valley, indeed, including the property that was now Mr. Carroll’s; that they had lost everything during the Civil War and emigrated to Georgia; and that it was only five years ago that the present Mr. Langdon had returned, to buy back the family home and with it the hosiery factory that had been erected by some one else. Stacey also learned, listening distractedly to Elijah, that there was no love for the factory owner among his employees, and that that one young fellow—“yes, suh, he’sbad, Mistuh Stacey!”—had said “how he was goin’ togetMistuh Langdon one day.”
“Well—and then?” thought Stacey, with a shrug of his shoulders, finding the intention laudable enough, but seeing no solution of anything in it.
But one night toward the end of April Stacey, lying awake on his sleeping-porch, became aware of an odd glow in the moonless night. “A fire, of course,” he thought, as he got quickly out of bed to make sure that it was not in his own house. Houses hereabouts always burned down sooner or later, what with the general carelessness and the lack of any fire department. But from his porch, which faced west, Stacey could not see the fire. It must be somewhere to the east, since it reddened the near side of the shrubbery on the lawn and shone fantastically against the glossy leaves of a tulip tree.
He hurried down the hall to the other end of the house. But tall trees and the distant barrier of white pines that marked the Carroll boundary cut off his view, and he could make out only that the fire was somewhere in Meldrun. The confused murmur of many voices reached him.
He threw on some clothes, slipped an electric flash-light into his pocket, then ran downstairs. Elijah was just starting up then. The old man was breathless with haste and excitement. “It—it am Mistuh Langdon’s house ’at’s buhnin’, Mistuh Stacey!” he stuttered. “My Lawd, but she shuah is buhnin’, suh!”
For a moment Stacey was rather pleased at the news; then he shrugged his shoulders at feeling so childish an emotion. “All right,” he said, “I’ll go over and see if I can help.”
Running easily, he did the quarter of a mile in three minutes, and, vaulting a fence, came out upon the sloping lawn of the Langdon home. It was covered with people shouting and moving about busily—mostly workers from the factory, and strewn with such household goods as had been rescued. The east wing of the house was burning fiercely; flames lapped the roof of the central part, and black smoke curled out of its upper windows. The west wing was not yet burning, though its blistered paint was peeling off in great flakes, and little spirals of smoke rose from its roof where sparks had caught.
Glancing around him in the flickering light, Stacey perceived a young woman sitting motionless on an overturned mahogany sideboard, a child in her lap and two others clinging to her skirts. He went up to her quickly.
“Mrs. Langdon?” he said stiffly. “I’m Stacey Carroll. Please tell me what to do.” He spoke stiffly not because he was unfriendly, but because Mrs. Langdon, like all the rest of the people around him, seemed far away, unrelated, a mere distant mathematical fact about which no emotion was possible.
“Thank you, Mr. Carroll,” she said pleasantly. “I’m afraid there’s nothing. The men are getting out what they can.”
“Well, I can help with that,” he replied.
The youngest child, a girl of six, was crying bitterly in her mother’s arms. “Mitzi, I want my Mitzi!” she sobbed monotonously.
“Who’s Mitzi?” Stacey asked quickly. “Some pet—still in the house?”
Mrs. Langdon smiled. “Mitzi is only Helen’s doll,” she explained. “We forgot it in the hurry, and now it’s too late. Her room was full of smoke even when we left it.”
Stacey, too, smiled—ever so faintly touched. “I’ll go and see if I can help Mr. Langdon,” he remarked. “Where is he?”
“Oh, thank you!” said the young woman. “He’s there at the west end of the house. Please don’t let him climb in again. He’s strained his ankle.”
A ladder had been placed against the low porch at the end of the west wing. Stacey scrambled up to the roof of the porch, where he found Mr. Langdon and others among a heterogeneous collection of household goods that had been carried out through an open second-story window. The tin roof was uncomfortably hot, and there was a good deal of smoke. Mr. Langdon was directing the lowering to the ground of a sofa and pausing between times to toss down less fragile belongings as they were brought out to him through the window. He appeared quite calm and greeted Stacey courteously.
“Mrs. Langdon told me you had strained your ankle,” Stacey remarked. “Hadn’t you better go back down and let me tend to this for you?”
“That is very kind of you, sir,” Mr. Langdon replied, “but I am all right. I regret that I cannot go inside with the others.”
“Well, I can do that, anyway,” said Stacey curtly, and, disregarding the other’s protests, went quickly over to the window and through it.
The room beyond was very hot but not yet burning, and there was not even much smoke. Three or four men were gathering up the few objects still remaining in it, and a frightened negro servant was standing very close to the window and directing their efforts. No one paid the least attention to his instructions, but a youth, coming in with a mattress from a room beyond, called: “Come on in theah, Joe!” at which the negro shook his head vigorously and the others laughed. Stacey went through another door.
This room was smoky and also nearly emptied of its furnishings. But three doors opened out of it and beyond one of these Stacey found himself at once in a hot choking mist. Here he was alone. He drew out his flash-light, and, his eyes smarting, explored the room. It was a sitting-room, he saw,—Mrs. Langdon’s probably,—and he could be of some use after all; for here hung a small Meissonier and there on a table was a vase—“Sèvres,” he remarked hoarsely. “Better than—mattresses.” He gathered up the vase, jerked the picture from the wall, and stumbled, coughing, from the room.
Just outside the door he ran into the young man of the mattress. “Here!” said Stacey wheezing, “take this—carefully—to Mr. Langdon, will you?”
“Shuah!” said the young man, who was chewing tobacco steadily. “You be’n in theah?” he inquired, waving his hand at the door.
Stacey nodded.
“Well, wait a minute en’ I’ll go back in with you when I’ve toted these out.”
“I’ll—have to—wait a minute,” Stacey replied, and the young man departed.
Presently he returned, and together the two went back into the sitting-room for more loot, emerging dripping with sweat and half choked. Yet Stacey was beginning to enjoy himself.
They tried the other two rooms, the doors of which Stacey had already noticed. From the first they got—with difficulty—a fine rug, slightly scorched, and a mahogany stand. The second seemed impossible—a mass of black smoke.
“What’s in there, I wonder?” said Stacey hoarsely.
“I dunno,” the young fellow replied. “We mout ask that nigger, Joe.”
Only two or three men were left now even in the room next the porch, and Joe was definitely on the point of getting out of the window. However, he paused for an instant to answer the question.
“That theah room, that’s Miss Helen’s bedroom. Don’ you go theah, suh,” he said, and vanished.
Stacey reflected, with a half smile, then hurried back, his laconic acquaintance still at his side. Voices shouted at them from the porch.
The house was a furnace now. There was a heavy roaring in the air and every little while the sound of something crashing down. Nevertheless, Stacey plunged into the bedroom, and so, too, did his companion. It was unbearable, but, at least, one could see; a vivid flickering light shot through the smoke. After a moment Stacey made out the crib, dived for a blackened, almost unrecognizable object that lay on the smoldering sheets, and leaped back just as a beam fell, with a shower of sparks, from the ceiling. Together he and his companion fled back to the room next the porch and leaned, coughing and choking, against the window. The room was empty.
“Wh-what did you get?” Stacey asked hoarsely at last.
“A hoss,” replied the other, with a grin, holding up a toy.
“I got a doll,” said Stacey weakly.
And all at once, there in this burning room, it was as though something snapped within him. The strange barrier was down. The world came rushing up to meet him. He burst into a helpless fit of laughter.
“Do I—do I look as wild as you do?” he gasped, gazing at the other’s grimy face and singed hair.
“You shuah look pretty bad,” said the young man.
Stacey pulled himself together. “I should say we’d better get out of here,” he remarked.
“I reckon we had.”
They scrambled out over the smoking porch and down the ladder, surprised at the anxious group awaiting them.
Mr. Langdon seized Stacey’s hand. “Thank God, you’re down safely, Mr. Carroll!” he said. “We were worried, sir. You shouldn’t have stayed so long. You’re not burnt? Your clothes. . . . But the things you saved were very precious to me. That Meissonier . . .”
Stacey laughed. “Glad to be of some use,” he replied easily. “Where is Mrs. Langdon?”
“Back here out of the heat—just a few steps,” said the other, and led the way, limping.
The crowd had grown larger during Stacey’s absence. There were half a dozen small motor cars, too, on the lawn, and the lights of others standing in the road, a hundred yards distant, were visible.
Mrs. Langdon uttered an exclamation at Stacey’s appearance. But he gave her no chance to thank him.
“Helen,” he called, “is this Mitzi?” and held out the burnt blackened doll.
The child seized it, with a scream of joy. “Mitzi! Mitzi!” she cried.
Mrs. Langdon stared helplessly. “Do you mean to say that you risked your life to save—that doll, Mr. Carroll?” she demanded, half laughing, half crying.
“Oh, no, there wasn’t any danger—except of choking,” Stacey replied.
However, it occurred to him suddenly that to run risks blithely for a doll was just what he had done, and that this was somehow—he didn’t know—connected with the odd change of heart he was feeling.
“Oh,” he exclaimed suddenly, “and my friend saved a horse! Where’s he gone?”
“I got the hoss, Mistuh Stacey,” said Elijah, coming forward with the toy. “Mistuh Jim Bradley, he give it to me to bring. He’s done gone, Mistuh Bradley is.”
“That was sweet of him!” Mrs. Langdon exclaimed.
“What the dickens did he go for?” Stacey remarked regretfully. Jim Bradley? He’d heard the name somewhere.
“You must come over to my place for the night,” he observed. “No, no, it would be silly to go into town when I’ve all those empty rooms,” he added quickly, as Mr. Langdon attempted to protest. “And you’ll want to get back here early in the morning to see to things.”
He was insistent, and they, no doubt, were very tired. At any rate, they yielded.
“A cousin of mine has brought his Ford around,” said Mr. Langdon. “He’ll take us over presently. But—”
“Good! Then Elijah and I will cut across and get things ready,” Stacey concluded.
Back at the house, Stacey plunged into a bath, then hurriedly put on other clothes. But all at once he paused in his dressing and uttered an exclamation. Jim Bradley? Of course! It was the name of the young man who, Elijah said, had threatened to “get” Mr. Langdon. Stacey smiled, then frowned.
Before long the Langdons arrived, with a car-load of rescued clothes. Stacey welcomed them cordially.
“Elijah has your rooms ready,” he said, “and there’s a bathroom next one of them.”
“Thank you,” murmured Mrs. Langdon. “I’ll put the children to bed and leave you my husband meanwhile.”
He helped them upstairs with their things, looked down with a smile at Helen, as her father laid her, fast asleep, on the bed, Mitzi still clutched in her arms, then returned with Mr. Langdon to the big living-room.
They sat down, and Stacey gazed at his guest with interest. A simple likable man, with a kindly face, and extremely well-bred.
“I trust,” said Stacey pleasantly, as he offered him a cigarette, “that you carried adequate insurance.”
Mr. Langdon smiled faintly. “About enough to cover the first mortgage,” he returned quietly.
Stacey paused in the act of lighting a match, and stared.
“The whole investment was a mistake, sir,” his guest continued mildly. “For sentimental reasons I am sorry to lose the house, but it was a burden. The factory has never paid, and the rate of interest banks hereabouts demand on loans is ruinous—ten to twelve per cent. I shall sell out for what I can get and go back to Macon. Forgive my troubling you with such mention of personal affairs.”
“On the contrary, I am interested—and sorry,” Stacey replied sincerely. He fell silent for a moment. So the villain of the piece must be sought elsewhere? Among the bankers? Stacey shook his head. Not there, either. He pulled himself back to his duties as host.
After a time Mrs. Langdon came down. She had put on another dress, and there was a touch of coquetry in her manner toward Stacey. Both she and her husband were behaving like good sports, he thought. Elijah brought in coffee and sandwiches, and the three talked pleasantly together for half an hour.
Nevertheless, Stacey was relieved when his guests went up to bed. Somehow he seemed to have broken free; he was no longer a pacing animal in a cage; and he wanted to think things out. He leaned against the mantelpiece and gazed off across the room with grave abstracted eyes.
His absurd rescue of that wretched doll—why had so trivial an act seemed to shake him out of a long lethargy? The answer leaped up at him almost at once. Not the kindness but the sheer futility of his act—just this was what had struck him as a heartening revelation. He had risked his life for a doll! Jim Bradley had sworn to “get” an enemy, then had gone through flames to save his enemy’s household goods!
For, thinking swiftly, Stacey perceived now that he had not told the truth when he had asserted passionately to Mrs. Latimer that he found the world chaos—with no scheme, nothing. What reason for anger in that? No, as a youth, he had assumed the world to be built upon an agreeable scheme, and then afterward, all unknown to himself, he had fancied it an evil scheme. It was neither. It was what he had insincerely called it—chaos, a grovelling incoherent assemblage of facts. The thought of greed—he had been obsessed by it just because he had seen it as something permanent, consistent—and successful. Pshaw! An ugly thing, greed, but pitiful and futile, like everything else. Where did it get any one? The greedy man was a man struggling for happiness. Well, did he achieve happiness? Hate died out of Stacey. You could not hate what was a failure.
So much he made out in a series of flashes. Much more, that lay behind, was obscurer. He dropped into an arm-chair and sat there, motionless, for a long time, reflecting intensely. Sometimes he would spring to his feet and pace up and down the room for a while, and light a fresh cigarette or pause to finger abstractedly some vase or book, then return to his chair.
It was not, of course, he understood, this one evening’s performance that had shocked him into sanity—or what he hoped was sanity. This long isolation from men, from a world interested only in economics, had calmed him; for in it his youthful gift of fancy, choked back for so long, had been let loose again. You could not choke things back without suffering for it. . . . He had been like a man living in compartments—first in one, then in another. That was wrong. He ought to live wholly, with all of himself. . . . What he had been in his youth—that, too, he still was. Nothing in one ever died.
It was as far as Stacey could get—and this only slowly, with difficulty. But he could, he thought, go back to the real world now and start over again.
Stacey had left Vernon in December; it was on an afternoon in May that he returned to it. Tulips bloomed gaily in well tended beds along the boulevard at which he gazed from his taxi. A fresh spring smell was in the air. The city was at its best.
Stacey looked at it inquiringly, almost as though it were new to him. And in a sense it was new; for he did not feel toward it in any way that he had felt before. He saw the business buildings standing angularly against the blue sky, the handsome residences of varied architecture, the wide streets that were rivers of motor cars, and he noted, as often, that esthetically the city was faulty and aspiring, and that socially it was energetic and confident. He received again an impression of people striving relentlessly to attain certain things and clinging to them desperately when attained. But he did not feel for these characteristics either admiration or disapproval, affection or distaste. What he did feel was curiosity, because it seemed to him that he knew very little about Vernon really, and an odd touch of pity. For the first time it struck him as rather pathetic to care so hard about motor cars and bathrooms and servants. Here were wealthy men riding triumphantly in imported Rolls-Royces, and poor men riding in Fords, or walking, and hating the rich men. What a to-do! Oh, well, it couldn’t be helped! Stacey supposed. Economics were the order of the day.
Presently he reached his father’s house. “Hello, Parker,” he said to the surprised servant who opened the door. “I’m back, you see,—and without so much as sending a wire. How are you? Mr. Carroll well? Take this bag up to my room for me, will you, please? I certainly do need a bath. Oh, yes, I’ve had lunch, thanks.”
An hour later he strolled down to the dining-room for a whiskey and soda, then, glass in hand, into the library. And there, sitting with a book in a high-backed chair, was Catherine.
“Why, Catherine!” Stacey exclaimed, going toward her quickly and holding out his hand.
She had risen swiftly, as surprised as he. She was wearing a black dress, but with a wide pointed collar of white lace at her bare throat. She looked firm and grave and slender.
“Well, isn’t this jolly?” he said, shaking her hand cordially. “What are you doing here?”
“Didn’t you get my last letter?” she asked, with some embarrassment. “I think your father wrote you, too.”
“I did get your letter and one from father,” he replied, “just before I left Pickens, but, to tell you the truth, I’ve brought them back unopened in my bag. I thought it would be so much nicer to talk with you both. It sounds rude and unappreciative, but I didn’t mean it that way.” She was still gazing at him, and he saw that she was distressed about something and as shy as ever. “Sit down, do!” he said.
She obeyed. “You see,” she began slowly, “I didn’t think you’d be back yet. And a little while ago, when the rent period on our house was up, your father said—he’s been so awfully kind to us always—and he said—”
“Catherine,” Stacey interrupted, “it’s oppressive to see any one with as much to say as you always have, so unable to say it.” (She bit her lip.) “My father said: ‘I insist on your coming to live here. It’s a big place and I need a housekeeper.’ ”
But, though he laughed, Stacey did not feel mirthful. He had a sudden perception of how lonely his father had been, how lonely Catherine had been.
“Yes,” she returned, “that was what he said. And I was weak enough to accept, though I knew it was only kindness on his part. But Iwasgoing away when you came back, Stacey.”
“Oh,” he remarked, “you were!”
Again she bit her lip. “I mean,” she added quickly, “that we might have been in your way and—”
“Catherine,” said Stacey, getting up and standing beside her, “I think your being here is delightful. I should feel very badly if you went away. There’s my hand on it.”
She looked at him in a puzzled manner and thanked him, rather unsteadily, because he had been so cordial. A little of her shyness had vanished when he sat down again.
“You came back,” she said.
He nodded. “I’d ridden everywhere there was to ride; so all at once I decided I’d come back to the world.” And he became silent. “Where are the boys?” he demanded suddenly.
“At school,” she replied, “but it’s four now. They’ll be here any minute.”
And only a little later they did come in. Jack was unrestrained from the first, but Carter, probably coached by his mother, was impressively correct until he caught sight of Stacey and threw reserve to the winds.
The library echoed with noise and there was a touch of color in Catherine’s cheeks when at five o’clock Mr. Carroll opened the door of the room and stood at the threshold, looking in.
“Well, son!” he exclaimed.
Stacey sprang up. “Surprise party, dad!” he remarked, shaking his father’s hand. “Quite a good one, don’t you think?”
“I should say so!” Mr. Carroll replied, while Catherine quieted the boys and made them sit beside her with a book. “How was everything down there? Did you ride over that Garett Creek path you and I found once?”
“Yes,” said Stacey, “there and everywhere else.”
After the initial burst of cordiality they fell silent, finding little to say to each other. How estranged they were! Stacey thought. The murmur of the children’s voices and the subdued sound of Catherine’s words explaining a story were comforting—to Stacey certainly, to his father almost as certainly—filling in the emptiness.
Mr. Carroll called Jack to him—Jack seemed to be his favorite—and joked with the child much more naturally than he could joke with Stacey. As for Stacey, he talked with Catherine and Carter.
After a while Catherine announced to the boys that it was half-past five and they must go wash and get ready for dinner.
“Look here, Catherine!” remarked Mr. Carroll. “Do let them eat with us to-night.”
“Yes! Oh, yes, mother!” they cried in unison.
She shook her head. “No,” she said to them, “do as mother says,” and they went out slowly.
“No, please!” she replied to Mr. Carroll. “It’s awfully—good of you, but I’m sure it’s better this way.”
Mr. Carroll frowned. “Idea of Catherine’s,” he said, appealing to his son. “Boys must eat at six—an hour ahead of us. I’d like to have them at table with me. Can’t you do anything about it?”
Catherine was shy but firm. “I’d rather they wouldn’t, please,” she said.
Stacey laughed. “Lord! no, I can’t do anything about it!” he returned. “You have my full moral support, but what’s the use? Catherine’s the Rock of Gibraltar.”
His father laughed with him and spread out his hands in surrender. Perhaps he rather liked being successfully opposed. At any rate, there was less constraint between him and Stacey after this. If in no other way, Stacey thought, they could at least be united in a league of men against women. When Catherine went down to sit at table while her sons ate, the two men talked quite freely, though chiefly of her.
“You don’t mind my asking her and the boys to come over here?” Mr. Carroll asked apologetically.
Stacey was touched. “Good heavens, no!” he exclaimed. “It’s jolly for us and better for them. It was awfully good of you, sir.”
“No, no!” said his father gruffly. “Purely selfish. Brightens the house up. Long time since there were children here. You and Juliewouldgrow up, confound you!” he added wrathfully.
Stacey laughed a little at this. “Couldn’t help it, dad,” he replied. “I regret it as much as you do.”
“Fine girl, Catherine!” Mr. Carroll went on, after a moment. “I like her honesty and lack of nonsense. Some women would have refused to come because damned impertinent people might talk. They will, I suppose, having the kind of minds they’ve got.”
Stacey opened his eyes wide. “I never thought of that,” he said. “But I should say,” he added, “that if they do, why, let them.”
Mr. Carroll nodded emphatically. “Let them,” he assented.
So Stacey and his father were also incongruously united in a revolutionary league against society.
“But do you know what Catherine does, confound her!” Mr. Carroll added. “Insists on paying me the same amount as it cost her to live in that other house! Says she won’t stay otherwise!” He laughed, half admiringly, half in exasperation.
Stacey enjoyed himself, in a mixed way, at dinner. Indeed, he was never really bored. He had loved life once and hated it later. Indifference was impossible to him, however much his attitude toward things altered. He looked across the table at Catherine, studying her firm grave face over which her grief had lowered an intangible something like a veil, an expression of reserve, sweetness and knowledge. At bottom Stacey was rather afraid of Catherine. And, while conversation ran on well enough, he studied his father’s face, too. What an odd trio they made! he thought. And he noted that his father’s expression was stern to harshness when Mr. Carroll talked of general subjects such as the present Democratic administration or Article X of the League of Nations, but softened when he spoke to Stacey or Catherine of individual things or people.
Just at present he was talking about the state of the whole country, and, as the subject was especially large, he looked especially fierce, his white eyebrows meeting in a frown above his fine nose.
“The country’s had enough of Wilson and his policies,” he was saying. “You can go way back to his action in knuckling down to the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers if you want to get at the start of the whole trouble. A toady! A trimmer! A schoolmaster! Yes, sir! The world has taken Wilson’s measure pretty well by now.” Mr. Carroll drank a swallow of claret, then set his glass down with a bump. “Then the Armistice!” he burst out again. “Look at that! All Wilson with his idiotic Fourteen Points and his ‘Peace without Victory!’ There we had the Germans on the run. Two weeks’ time—a month—and our boys and the Allies would have marched into Berlin, and then we’d have known who won the war.”
Mr. Carroll did not stop here by any means. He continued, sweeping along like a surf-rider on the flood of his indictments.
But Stacey lost track. He remembered, as something out of a dim different past, that he had countered this same argument in regard to the Armistice at dinner that first night of his return, and that he had then apparently convinced his father. However, this awakened no antagonism in Stacey. He merely felt amused. Somehow, in some way not yet clear to himself, he had most certainly changed. He was recalled to the present by the vigor with which his father pronounced the word “Bolshevism.”
“That’s the whole trouble—Bolshevism! The country’s rotten with it, and will be until we get a sane business administration and put labor and radicalism in their place.”
Mr. Carroll was carving a chicken at the time—he scorned effeminate households where the carving was done in the butler’s pantry—and he thrust the fork deep down across the breast-bone of the chicken as though he were impaling Lenin, Gompers, Haywood, and Daniels all at once.
But a moment later, and quite instinctively, he laid the liver and the heart beside a drumstick on Stacey’s plate; and at this Stacey was touched, for he knew that, like himself, his father had retained a boyish love of the giblets. Often he had seen his father on looking through the ice-box of a Sunday night turn around and hold out with a triumphant smile a plate of chicken where reposed, brown, crisp and indigestible, a cold gizzard and perhaps a heart.
So: “I think you are very likely right, sir,” said Stacey.
As a matter of fact, it cost him little to say this; for he found himself quite without interest in Bolshevism, the labor problem, or the Democratic maladministration.
As for Mr. Carroll, he gave his son a pleased, rather surprised smile, and presently dropped all problems. But Catherine looked across at Stacey with a strange startled expression.
After dinner they went into the library and Catherine poured coffee.
“I wish, Catherine,” Stacey exclaimed, with a touch of exasperation, “that you wouldn’t glance at me in such a confoundedly apprehensive way, as though you were afraid I might object to your pouring coffee here! I like it. How many times must I tell you?”
“Very well, Stacey, I’ll try to be bold,” she replied, a faint smile relieving the gravity of her face.
Mr. Carroll laughed approvingly. “You’re going to be a great help to me, son,” he said.
But Parker came in to tell Mr. Carroll that Long Distance was calling him on the ’phone; so Stacey and Catherine were left by themselves for a few minutes.
“Any one not knowing my father well might think, to hear him talk of Bolshevism and labor, that he was harsh,” Stacey observed. “He’s not. He’s not even bigoted, really.”
“Oh, I’m sure he’s not!” Catherine exclaimed. “He’s the kindest man I’ve ever known.”
“Yes. You see, partly it’s because he himself has worked all his life like three ordinary men and, conceding the system, has made his fortune honestly. It isn’t merely that he wants to hold what he’s acquired. It’s rather that unconsciously he feels any attack on the system as an attack on his own integrity.” Stacey paused, with a frown. “It’s something even more than that,” he continued slowly. “If a man has all his life played the game vigorously and loyally according to the rules, he doesn’t at sixty-one want to be told that the rules were all wrong. That would be knocking everything from under him. Father has to believe that what is is right, or where would he be? Right and wrong mean a great deal to him—he’s old-fashioned in that. And then, I must say, itisa slovenly world at present for a man with clean-cut ideas to look out on. A bedraggled tattered place, with cocky young chaps sitting in literary offices and blithely announcing every week that something else is wrong with things in general. Not that there isn’t enough that’s wrong, and the more truth that’s told about it, the better; but a lot of the complaining is either whining or just rotten cleverness. Fancy being clever about a cyclone—or the Judgment Day!” He paused and lit a cigarette. “Father’s an out-and-out idealist,” Stacey concluded. “He’s got to believe passionately in something, and he’s too old to believe in something new. Besides, nothing new is clearly presented to one.”
“Yes,” Catherine said, “that is very clear and fair, Stacey.” But the look that her dark eyes gave him was full of perplexity.
“Oh,” he observed lightly, “I know! You think I’m a reformed character. Not a bit of it! ‘Nothing of me that doth fade, but doth suffer a sea-change into something rich and strange.’ ” He laughed ironically.
And Catherine was much too shy, as he knew she would be, to pursue the subject.
When later he went upstairs he stood for a long time before the open window of his study. “It can’t be done,” he said to himself at last. “You can’t look at the world as a whole and stay sane. Because there isn’t any such world. That’s a nightmare of ogre words. Bolshevism, labor problem, greed, reaction,—they’re merely words. All that there truly is is a lot of puny little men like myself, dreaming dreams—mostly bad ones.”
At nine the next morning Stacey drove down town with his father. Perhaps no real intimacy was possible between them, since they had hardly a thought or a belief in common, but they were, simply through a heightened mutual friendliness, closer together than they had been for six years. Stacey went up to his father’s pleasant office and watched Mr. Carroll sit down in his swivel-chair, light a cigar, and open his letters with a paper-knife.
Stacey smiled. “I’ve sometimes wondered, sir,” he said, “why at sixty or thereabouts you—”
“Here! Here! Stop it!” Mr. Carroll interrupted ruefully.
“Well, anyway I’ve wondered why you didn’t retire and just amuse yourself, since you’ve certainly earned a rest. But—”
“Retire? Nonsense! Work,—that’s all a man’s good for. Got to stay in harness. Soon as he gets out of it he goes to pieces.”
“H’m,” said Stacey banteringly, “that’s the theory, of course. But just look around you. Here you come down to a bright jolly office entirely cut off from the home, and open nice crisp new letters, and call in—presently, when I stop bothering you—a fresh clean stenographer, and you watch the blue smoke of a good cigar curl up across the sunlight—no, sir, you can’t fool me with any talk about duty and the rest. Poetry! Sheer poetry! Men’s ingenuous little romance!”
Mr. Carroll leaned back in his chair and laughed.
“American business men,—why they’re our real leisure class!” Stacey concluded.
But at this his father protested. “I worked ten hours a day and sometimes twelve—hard—from the time I was eighteen till past forty,” he observed soberly.
“I know you did, sir,” Stacey assented respectfully. “I’m not talking about that epoch but about our own. The young business men I know—and I don’t mean the clerks, people working on a salary, but the men who will be rich one day from business—how about them? They get down to their offices anywhere from nine-thirty to ten, and they waste a good half-hour before they begin to work, and they play a lot even when they think they’re working; then they take an hour and a half off at the club for lunch; at four or thereabouts, weather permitting, they motor out to the country-club and play nine holes of golf; then they go back to a nice, different, clean house, with all the housekeeping tended to by their pretty wives. Oh, it’s a hard life!”
“You’re right,” the older man growled. “It’s a damned lazy life, and I don’t know what the country’s coming to if it keeps on.”
“Now really,” Stacey suggested, “canyou blame a laboring man if he kicks?”
But at this Mr. Carroll’s mouth shut in a tight line. “I’m against loafing anywhere in any class,” he said sternly. “The laborer’s got his job and he loafs on it; the young business man has his andheloafs. I disapprove of both.”
“Yes,” Stacey returned mildly, “but the results are so disproportionate. The young business idler has a far more luxurious time than the most conscientious laborer could have.”
But on a point like this Mr. Carroll would never yield an inch. “Labor is getting a bigger reward for less work than it ever got before,” he said. Then he changed the subject. “You know, son,” he remarked, with a sudden smile, “to see you sitting there brings back so many things. I can’t get over the feeling that you’re a boy, as you used to be, and have come up and made yourself agreeable in preparation to touching me for money. You don’t need money, do you?” he asked wistfully.
“Goodness, no!” said Stacey, who had just ten dollars to last the rest of the month. He would have liked to oblige his father, but he really couldn’t, in this. He got up to go, and Mr. Carroll touched the button that would summon his stenographer.
“I’ll run along now and leave you in peace,” Stacey observed. “I’m going down to see if Parkins will give me a job.”
At this Mr. Carroll lifted his head quickly and gave him a sharp look. “Just a minute, Ruth,” he said to the young woman who had opened the door. “I’ll ring for you again presently.” She went out.
Mr. Carroll gazed at his son with interest. “Going back to work, eh?”
“Yes.”
“Look here!” said the older man sharply. “How would you like a job with me? Lots of big things you could work into.”
Stacey hesitated. He would have done a great deal to please his father. But after a moment he shook his head.
“No, sir,” he replied reluctantly. “I’d like it; honestly I would. It would be a fascinating new game. But architecture is the one thing I know about. You gave me years of study in it. I’d better stick to it.”
His father nodded. “Right!” he said. “I can see that.”
A few minutes later Stacey opened the door of Mr. Parkins’s private office. “Hello!” he remarked. “Can I come in?”
“Well, Stacey!” cried the architect cordially. “How are you?”
“First-rate. Got a job for me?”
Mr. Parkins stared at him with a humorous smile. “Nowwhat have you gone and done—reformed?”
Stacey laughed. “Not so far as I know,” he said lightly.
“Then you must have acquired grace.”
Stacey waved the suggestion aside deprecatingly. “No,” he said, “but I’ll tell you the truth. I’ve worried my head too long about the problems of the universe. Everybody’s doing it. A mistake. Work’s all there is for a man—not as a drug, but just because it’s the only thing he knows about and can take hold of.” And Stacey had not equivocated. As far as it went this did seem truth to him—just a fragment of the truth. “How about that job?” he added.
“Sure! Glad to have you. We need you badly. Hadn’t found any one to replace poor Phil Blair. My offer’s still open.”
“No,” said Stacey, suddenly grave at the mention of Phil, “take me on for a couple of months at the old salary. Then if I’m any good you can repeat your offer if you want to. I may have forgotten everything I knew. Tell me,” he added, suddenly feeling all this as of very little importance, “how did Phil do? Tell me about Phil.”
“The most lovable chap I’ve ever known,” said Mr. Parkins soberly, “and he worked very hard—too hard. I could have cried when I heard he was dead. But he wasn’t the best man for the place. You would have been better. Odd, that power in any one so frail! I felt as though I were hiring Bramante to design bath-tubs.”
Stacey nodded.
The architect smiled suddenly. “I didn’t mean what I said to sound uncomplimentary to you,” he added.
“Oh,” said Stacey impatiently, “I never thought of that. I’ll be down ready to work at nine to-morrow morning. Good-bye.” And he left the office abruptly.
When he was again on the street he hesitated for a moment, then set off on foot for his sister’s house, two miles distant. But the mention of Phil’s name had thrown him into so deep a preoccupation that he walked mechanically, hardly aware of his surroundings, and did not even notice the greetings people waved at him from passing motor cars. He had neglected Phil for chimaeras, he mused sadly. When you thought about life as a whole it was horrible—and dead—a cold motionless monster that froze your veins. Real life, good or bad, wretched or happy, but warm, was in personal relationships—and nowhere else. He had let veil after gray veil of bleak abstractions descend between himself and Phil, obscuring this warmest and freshest of realities. And now Phil was dead. So Stacey meditated, but without bitterness; for there was a kind of fatalism upon him. Whatever was, was. Well, there was still Catherine. Perhaps he could make it up to her a little.
But when at last he mounted the steps of his sister’s house his melancholy fled; for he was genuinely eager to see Julie and was glad when the maid told him she was at home—out in the garden behind the house, he learned, and made haste to join her.
“Well, Stace!” she cried joyfully at sight of him, and threw her arms around him in a warm hug, taking care to keep her gloved hands, which were muddy with weeding, from touching his coat, and laughing because of doing so. “Iamglad to see you! I only heard this morning. If I’d known last night we’d have been around to the house. Why didn’t you call me up? How fit you’re looking!” And she drew away to gaze at him, while he dropped down upon a bench and looked back, smiling, at her.
She was plump and sweet-natured, Stacey thought, and in the bright May sunlight her complexion showed, undamaged, that clear healthy freshness which can be retained only by decent living. He was glad to be with her.
“Jimmy and Junior both well?” he asked.
“Splendid! Jimmy’s getting rather fat, and I—well, you see! So we’re both dieting. We sit with a book propped up in front of us and count the calories in everything.” She laughed and sat down beside her brother.
“Too much happiness,” said Stacey. “Not enough conflict. You and Jimmy ought to fight more.”
He was wondering about his sister. Could it really be that she encountered no problems at all? There was a sweetness and a sureness about her that made him doubt such an obvious hypothesis.
“I’ll stay to lunch, Jule, if you’ll ask me,” he began, “because—”
“Of course I will! How nice!” she interrupted.
“—Because it will be my only chance for a while. I’m going back to work with Parkins to-morrow.”
“Oh, I’m glad!” she exclaimed.
“Are you? Why?”
She looked at him rather shyly, frowning a little. “Because,” she said after just an instant, “you have so fine a training it seems a shame to waste it and let houses be built more clumsily by people who haven’t had it.”
Stacey felt grateful for her reply. She might have said: “Because I think you’ll be happier,” or: “Because I think every man ought to do something.” She had their father’s direct way of going straight to the heart of a question, and she was so simple about it that she got no credit for intelligence. What she said always sounded usual.
She went on with her weeding now, and they talked cordially of superficial things.
Junior, back from kindergarten, made himself the centre of conversation during lunch, but afterward Julie sent him away with his nurse, and sat down with Stacey in the living-room.
It was curious, he thought, what a sense of intimacy he felt, since, except for that one remark of hers, they had talked only of externals.
“Julie,” he demanded abruptly, “does everything really run along for you as smoothly as it seems to? Are you truly perfectly happy?”
She gave him a startled look, her eyes suddenly troubled. “No,” she said painfully, after a long moment, “I’m not so—bovine as all that. Oh,” she added quickly, “I get along! I haven’t any soul tragedies and I’m not in love with some other man than Jimmy, but there are things”—she pressed her fingers together nervously—“differentthings—that I’d like to do—or feel. Reckless things!”
Looking into her flushed face, Stacey perceived a strange unknown Julie, and he, too, was troubled and remorseful. “I didn’t know,” he said.
“You never tried to find out, did you, Stacey dear?” she replied gently.
“No,” he assented.
“But why should you?” she asked, defending him against her own attack. “Every one’s the same way. They all think: ‘Oh, Julie,—just the typical housewife!’ ”
“The more fools they!” Stacey muttered.
“No, it’s natural. I behave that way. I have to behave some way.”
“It’s a lot to your credit. The world would be smoother if every one did. Don’t be cross with me for stirring you up, Jule. It wasn’t nasty—or meant to be. I was only interested.”
She gave him a warm smile. “Of course I’m not cross. I think it was nice of you,” she said, quite her everyday self again.
But perhaps it was because of what he had said that she ventured, a little later, to bring up another subject.
“Stacey,” she began, rather hesitantly, “I think what father has done in asking Catherine to stay at the house is splendid, and I’m truly glad about it. I love Catherine. But I thought perhaps you ought to know that some peoplearegossiping about it.”
“Are they?” he remarked. “We thought—father and I—that they probably would.”
Julie looked relieved. “Then that’s all right,” she observed. “It was only on Catherine’s account that I was disturbed.”
“Catherine would mind even less than we.”
Julie nodded. “And of course,” she went on, “they don’t dare say anything really nasty—only small catty things.” She paused for a moment, looking at her brother. “Do you know who it was that started such talk?” she added suddenly. “Marian Price.”
Stacey’s brows contracted. “Marian?” he repeated slowly. “What kind of things did Marian say?”
His sister’s face was hard. “Oh, that it was all a scheme of Catherine’s to catch you! And that you were so susceptible she’d undoubtedly succeed.”
Stacey experienced a sudden sick disgust, but the feeling vanished presently. “Poor Marian!” he said.
“Poor Marian!” Julie cried. “Why, I’d like to know? Hasn’t she got what she wanted?”
“No. Because she doesn’t know what she wants,” Stacey returned slowly. “She wants so many different conflicting things, and she doesn’t know what any of them are. Marian’s wretched.”
But Julie’s eyes were cold. “Anyhow, you’ve been away this winter, so you don’t know all that I do about Marian. I’m afraid she’s a bad lot.”
Stacey winced. “No,” he replied, though kindly enough, “you’re not afraid of that, Julie. You’d rather have it so.”
His sister rose quickly and came over to sit beside him on the davenport. “Yes,” she admitted contritely, “that was nasty of me. But I can’t like Marian. I never could.” She gazed at her brother timidly. “Stace,” she said, her face flushing, “are you—are you still in love with Marian?” She appeared rather frightened at her own daring.
“No,” he replied simply, looking straight into his sister’s eyes. “No. Not any more. Not the least bit.”
Julie drew a deep breath. “Then you may be as sorry for her as you like,” she said happily.
The rest of their talk was matter-of-fact and trivial enough. But when Stacey got up to go Julie accompanied him to the door. She seemed all at once a little uneasy.
“Stacey,” she remarked, not looking at him and playing with a button of his coat, “please don’t think from—anything I said—that I’m not—decently happy. I am; of course I am. It sounds ungrateful. No one could be sweeter than Jimmy; and then there’s Junior. I—”
Her brother laughed. “Don’t be a silly, Jule!” he interrupted. “I understood perfectly well what you meant. That, in spite of everything, you did have some thwarted desires. So has Jimmy, no doubt. So has every one. It’s just as well, I dare say. There’s been less thwarting than normally going on these last few years—the lid’s been lifted a little—and look at the hellish mess! Good-bye. Thanks a lot. I had a lovely time.”
As he walked away he meditated about Marian. How she hated him! Oh, not because he had broken their engagement. In the end she had seen eye-to-eye with him about that, acquiescing cynically in his second estimate of her (which, he knew now, had been as false as his first). She was angry because he had not come to her house that winter night. He pictured vividly how she must have looked, what she must have felt, while she sat there waiting and waiting, till at last, white and still with fury, she went up to bed. She had offered him all that she thought she had to give, and he had accepted, then changed his mind. Consciously superior in morals, she must have thought him. He hadn’t been, heaven knew! No wonder she hated him! He had no passion left for Marian—at least, there was none in the thought of her; there was no telling what her physical presence might stir up in him—but he felt a bruised tenderness for her and sorrow that she should be so wretched. Hehadloved her. Her alone!