The Lonely Warrior

On the afternoon of the fifth day of November, 1914, Edward Carroll was sitting as usual in his pleasant inner office, the windows of which looked down upon the middle-western city where Mr. Carroll had lived for forty of his fifty-six years. But he was not behaving quite as usual. At this hour he should normally have been conferring with other men upon matters of importance—matters concerning the cement works of which he was vice-president, or the bank of which he was a director, or the copper mines whose policy he principally determined. Or he should, at the very least, have been dictating replies to half a dozen important letters that had been placed on his desk while he was out at luncheon. Instead, Mr. Carroll merely sat in his chair and stared oddly at a calendar on the wall opposite, as though its large black announcement of the date had some deep significance for him, as perhaps it had.

At last he shook his head impatiently and with a quick gesture pressed a button in his desk. Almost at once his stenographer entered the room.

“Ruth,” said Mr. Carroll, “did you tell me a little while ago that some one was waiting to see me?”

A faint surprise showed in the young woman’s composed face, but she answered the question quietly. “Yes, sir. Mr. Barnett and Mr. King.”

“Well, they’ll have to wait a little or come some other time. I must see Stacey first. He telephoned that he’d be here at three o’clock. It’s three-five now,” Mr. Carroll observed, drawing out his watch; which was quite unnecessary, since on the table before his eyes stood a small, perfectly regulated clock encased in thick curved glass that magnified its hands and characters conveniently. “When he comes send him in at once,” he concluded.

But the stenographer had scarcely left the room when the door was opened again and Stacey appeared.

He was a tall, handsome, well-built, young man, with blue eyes, short brown hair, and a clear healthy complexion from which the summer tan had even yet not quite faded. He looked, and was, well-bred and well educated, but there was nothing unusual or distinguished in any of his features, except perhaps in his mouth, which was finely modelled and sensitive without being self-conscious. The only thing at all out of the common about him was the impression he gave of restless but happy eagerness, of being fresh and untired and curious. He appeared about twenty-six or seven years old.

“Yes, sir,” said the young man, and took the chair at the opposite side of the desk.

There was a brief pause while the two gazed across at each other. Neither could consider the other with cool detached estimation,—years of familiarity were in the way; yet Stacey felt dimly that he was nearer to being outside than he could remember to have been before. He studied his father’s well-shaped head, with its thick gray hair, clipped moustache and firm mouth, in something of the spirit in which, being an architect, he would have studied a building. He saw his father to-day, quite clearly, as a man of tremendous, never wasted energy, and with a warm, generous, unspoiled heart. But it came over Stacey for the first time that the same directness which made his father go so unerringly to the point in business matters, discarding all non-essentials, made him inclined to hold very positive over-simplified opinions about things in general. Whereupon, all in this half-minute of silence, it also occurred to Stacey that business was like mathematics, founded on definite preassumed principles that you were always sure of, whereas those—Stacey supposed they were there—beneath life seemed a trifle wavering and indeterminate.

The older man pushed back his chair impatiently, and his face took on an almost querulous expression that set small uncharacteristic wrinkles to interfering oddly with its firm, deeply traced lines.

“Yes, I suppose I know what it is,” he said, “but I don’t see why you should make me state it. You want to go to the war, and you have an answer ready to every objection I can make. Damn it all, Stacey! It isn’t our war! If it becomes so I’ll be the first to say: ‘Enlist!’ but it isn’t—not yet, anyway.”

“You know you think it ought to be, father,” replied the young man steadily. “I’ve heard you say so a score of times. Every one with any generosity whom we know thinks it ought to be. I only want to live up to that conviction. I believe it’s right against wrong, the—the—soul against the machine; and so do you, or you wouldn’t have given so generously to Belgium.”

His father did not seem to be listening. He was staring away over his son’s head almost dreamily. “I remember when I built a play-house for you and Julie back of the stable. You were six years old and tried to carry two-by-fours to me. You didn’t succeed.”

“Stacey,” he went on, “I sent you to school and college for nine years, and then for two years all over Europe, and then for three years to the Beaux Arts in Paris. It’s taken—how old are you?”

“You don’t look it. It’s taken thirty careful years to educate you. You’re an expensive instrument ready for use. Are you going to throw all that away to do what some untrained laborer can do as well—no, better than you? Are all those years of training going to be to fit you for no other service than to—to stop a machine-gun bullet?”

“They ought not to be, father,” said the young man. “They wouldn’t be in a normal world. They were given me in a normal world for use in a normal world. But all of a sudden the normal world has been upset. It’s been wickedly assailed, wiped out for the moment, by the greatest crime in history. It’s up to every one of us to help bring it back. And all over Europe better men than I, men equally well educated, have given themselves freely—poets, painters, thinkers,—and trained business-men,” he added hastily.

However, it did not for an instant occur to Stacey to question the justice of his father’s argument. It seemed to him the only considerable argument against his going to war, and he again respectfully recognized his father’s ability to go straight to the essential point.

“But you see, sir,” he said, “that, true as your contention is for the world as it was—and isn’t, it doesn’t hold good now. For it would be equally true if America were in the war, yet then you would, as you said, be the first to want me to go.”

“I know. America isn’t in the war—yet; but every single trivial example like mine will help, just a little, to bring her in.”

The young man gazed at his father sadly. “I know,” he said. “It’s horrible. But all over the world it’s going on. The same question’s being asked—and set aside—in thousands and thousands of families. And—though it isn’t adequate compensation—you still at least have your work; which is more than wives and mothers have.”

At this Mr. Carroll pushed his chair back sharply. “My work!” he exclaimed angrily. “Who’s it for? For you, every bit of it! For you and Julie.”

After all, Stacey was young and had a sense of the ridiculous; so laughter surged up within him now and, though he kept it silent, relieved his tensity. For he was earning a respectable salary from the firm of architects in which he would soon have a junior partnership, and his father had long since given him two-hundred-thousand dollars’ worth of excellent municipal and industrial bonds, some bearing five, some five-and-a-half per cent.; while, as for his sister Julie, she not only had a strictly equal private fortune, but was also comfortably married to a prosperous young lawyer. But, knowing his father, and knowing him better than usual to-day, Stacey carefully kept his amusement to himself.

It vanished anyway when his father added: “And Marian?”—and Stacey winced.

“I haven’t told her yet. I’m going to tell her to-night,” he said, a little hoarsely. “It’ll almost break her heart, I’m afraid. All the Marians in the world are having their hearts broken to-day.”

“And all the fathers and mothers. I could pretty nearly say: ‘Thank God your mother is not living!’ ”

Stacey nodded grave assent. “The individual’s gone by the board.” After which silence fell upon both men.

At last the older man drew himself together. “What army?” he asked. “The French?”

“No, I thought of that, since I speak French decently,” said his son briskly, glad of the change in mood. “But I rather think—though I’m not sure—that I’d have to join the Foreign Legion there. And sacrifice is all very well, you know, but it needn’t be suicide. I mean to come back alive if I can do so honorably. And of course I’ve thought of the Canadian army. But there’s too much neighborly dislike between Canadians and Americans. So I’m going into the English army, if they’ll take me. I’ve a lot of friends in England, you know. I’ve visited some of them at their homes. They’ll all be in as officers. Perhaps I can get into some regiment where I’ll be under one of them.”

“Next Wednesday. I’ll catch the ‘Mauretania.’ Don’t be angry with me, sir,” he begged.

His father shook his head. “No,” he replied dully, “I suppose as a matter of fact I’d have done the same thing at your age.”

“It’s the kindest thing you could say to me,” said the young man, with a deep sigh of relief. He rose. “I mustn’t keep you any longer now. The office is full of people waiting to see you. I say, dad, to-night I—I must go to see Marian, but to-morrow night let’s dine at the club together and have champagne and then go to a show and be awfully gay!”

But when the door had closed behind him Mr. Carroll did not at once summon his stenographer. Instead, he sat gazing, as before Stacey’s arrival, at the calendar on the wall opposite. At last he rose, crossed the room, and tore off the leaf—“Nov. 5.” He folded the paper once across and placed it carefully in his pocket-book.

Stacey Carroll was not more unusual than most men, but he was as much so. The only difference was that his diversity had been fostered by his education, and that he was not ashamed of it, but clung to it as something of value, desiring only to suppress the appearance of it. He was healthy and vigorous mentally as well as physically, mixed easily with his fellows, and was as usual on the surface as were they—on the surface. But really he was unusual in being extraordinarily sensitive to impressions, to whatever was beautiful (provided it was also faintly exotic)—in short, to whatever was fine and delicate and fanciful.

And if one asks how it came about that, with this characteristic, he was content to live in the city of Vernon, which had two hundred thousand inhabitants, was situated in Illinois, was not very beautiful, and certainly had no touch of the exotic about it, the answer is that he was not—with this part of him. The part was not by any means the whole. With a great deal of the rest of him Stacey very much liked living in Vernon. He liked many Vernon people, he liked the physical comforts of his existence, and he did not dislike being a member of one of the city’s most prominent families. He had a great capacity for liking both people and things. He could perceive bad in them, but quite instinctively his mind singled out and dwelt on the good. Moreover, it should at once be said for Vernon that it differed from the average middle-western city of two hundred thousand inhabitants. Being close to Chicago it was metropolitan in feeling; plays came to it and music; its citizens—the ones Stacey knew—were sophisticated, well informed, almost too up-to-date; the houses that they built—often with Stacey’s help—were modern and handsome. The provincial spirit had long since vanished from Vernon.

And, after all, Stacey’s very eccentricity—his delight in what was wistful and lovely,—though it would certainly have been better satisfied in Paris, was not altogether starved in Vernon, as a love of classic line might have been. Books and music fed it; and where in the whole world could he have found more perfect satisfaction of it than in Marian Latimer?

For the three years that he had known her, to enter the door of the house in which she and her parents lived had been to him like crossing the threshold of fairy-land. Outside there might be street-cars and motors and the smell of soft coal; within there was charm and grace and peace—not stupid peace, tingling peace—and Marian, who embodied them all, with so much more, and spread them about her.

Never until this evening had Stacey entered the Latimer house without experiencing a sudden sense of buoyancy. But to-night his heart was so heavy that it seemed to weigh his whole body down. He had a curious feeling that he must tread carefully or he would break something.

In the narrow Colonial hallway he gave his coat and hat to the maid, then went into the drawing-room, which was white and spacious, though the house was small.

Mr. and Mrs. Latimer were there; Marian was not. Marian was never there. She was always coming from somewhere else or going somewhere else—both in space and time. At least, that was the impression she left lovingly in Stacey. Not that she was full of futile restlessness. It was only that her charm was the charm of movement, of running water, of a humming-bird. Mentally as well as physically—oh, far more!—she paused only at moments in her flittings. You hardly ever caught her. But that made the rare moment more precious.

Her parents greeted Stacey with quiet cordiality and made him sit down beside them in front of the open fire that, in the semi-darkness of the room, set reflections glowing here and there across the yellow of polished brass and the cool rich surface of statuettes.

“Marian will be down soon, I’ve no doubt,” said her father, with a low laugh at having said it so many times before.

Stacey considered him, feeling much the same appreciation he felt for Marian—only without the thrill and the sense of enchantment.

And, indeed, Mr. Latimer deserved appreciation. He was slim and straight, and his head was the head of a Greek youth grown old. Curly white hair, straight nose, short upper lip,—nothing was wrong. His profile, at which Stacey gazed now, was clear and perfect, like Marian’s. Until three years ago Mr. Latimer had lived, with his wife and daughter, his books, his pictures, and his Chinese vases, in Italy; and certainly a Florentine villa seemed the properer setting. For the life of him Stacey could not understand why the Latimers should have returned to live in America, and of all places in America should have chosen Vernon, Illinois, even if it was Mr. Latimer’s birthplace. But Stacey was devoutly grateful that they had done so. He rather thought it was due to Mrs. Latimer, and he was glad to think so, since it gave him something to like her for.

Mrs. Latimer, in fact, worried Stacey a little, because he could not make her out. She, too, was handsome in a way, but she seemed to Stacey not to be in the picture, but aloof, dispassionately commenting on everything and every one, including himself, her daughter, her husband, and her husband’s Chinese vases. Stacey recognized honorably that this was probably only his fancy; for Mrs. Latimer never passed such comment aloud. She was habitually quiet, letting others talk; but she was certainly not stupid. Sometimes she would laugh suddenly and spontaneously when neither Stacey nor Mr. Latimer had seen anything amusing until her laughter caught them up, and sent them back to look again, and made them laugh too, always appreciatively.

“You’re grave to-night, Stacey,” said Mr. Latimer, turning his eyes to the young man’s face. “I suppose it’s this catastrophic war. Of course it’s to your credit that you’re capable of feeling it intensely; the fact reveals a precious un-American gift of imagination. But you’re wrong, all the same, to let the thought of the war weigh you down, you know. I’m increasingly convinced that each man has a world of his own and that this is the only world in which he can profitably live. I’m more convinced of it than ever now when I see painters and philosophers and musicians dropping their arts and engaging in violent, quite futile polemics on something outside their own worlds. A painter’s ideas on, say, the correct method of building a sewer are without value; so also are his ideas on war. He wastes his own time and that of others in expressing them. To each man his own world. To you building noble houses. To me collecting vases. Also we have properly an outlet for our emotion there. We have no outlet for emotion concerning the war. That’s harmful.”

Stacey had listened to the melodious flow of Mr. Latimer’s words with a faint unaccustomed irritation. He could see no flaw in the argument; logically Mr. Latimer was right. Yet, even if uselessly and wastefully, how could one help abandoning cool logic while the terrible waves of the war flooded in from every side? Just as that afternoon it had occurred to Stacey that success in business entailed an over-simplified view of life, so now it occurred to him that success in living entailed too neat a perfection. Actually the two results were not so very far apart. How odd! “Of course,” he added to himself, “he does not know that I have found an outlet for my emotion about the war.” But Stacey was not going to tell Mr. Latimer of this. He was going to tell Marian—if she would only come.

“It’s the ‘tour d’ivoire’ theory, sir,” he said, after a brief pause. “I dare say—”

But fingers brushed his hair and forehead, and his words ceased abruptly, while his heart gave a bound, and a slow thrill crept over him.

But she was gone already and smiling at him mischievously from the arm of her father’s chair.

“I wonder,” Stacey said appealingly to Mrs. Latimer, “if you’d think me very abrupt in asking Marian to go up to the library with me. There’s something I want to talk over with her.”

Mrs. Latimer looked at the young man steadily, for the first time since his entrance. “No,” she said quietly, “do go.”

“I wonder,” said Marian gaily, “whether Marian is going to have anything to say about it.” But then, before the earnestness of Stacey’s expression, she ceased smiling and led him away.

Upstairs in the library she made him sit down in an easy chair and perched herself on an ottoman at his feet. She was admirably quick in responding to moods and she looked up at Stacey now with a tender gravity. He longed to stretch out his hand and touch her and draw her to him. But he knew that if he did so she would slip away from him to become all motion and fluidity again; so he merely sat and gazed at her fair curly hair, her eyes, her small mouth, and the delicate contour of her cheeks, thinking her like a Tanagra come to life.

“Marian dearest,” he said at last, “I’ve made up my mind about something—all alone, without asking you first, because if I’d asked you I’d have made it up wrong, no matter what you said. Marian, I’m going to the war.”

For just an instant the girl continued to gaze up at him, clearly not taking it in. Then her face flamed with eagerness.

It is true that the very next instant Marian’s mouth drooped and she cried: “Oh, Stacey!” again in a different lower tone, and suddenly was in the young man’s arms and kissing him tenderly.

But, though Stacey was made dizzy with love, the pain endured. As long as he lived, he felt, he would remember that Marian’s first thought had been that he was going to be a hero; that he was going away from her into that horrid mess across the Atlantic, perhaps to be killed, only her second thought. This perception did not develop into criticism of Marian. Stacey was incapable of criticizing Marian. She was perfect. It was simply a wound—the first the war inflicted on him.

And also he felt dimly that since this morning all the fine clarity of his life had given place to confusion. His reaction to everything was hopelessly different. Throughout the evening Marian was prodigal of her grace, showered him with impulsive expressions of affection; yet, instead of sheer loving delight in her, such things stirred him to physical and mental desire, desire to possess this girl, body and soul. He flushed with shame. He had never felt this way before; or, if he had, he had not known it.

When at last it was so late that Stacey simply must not stay longer, Marian accompanied him downstairs, her hand in his. They looked into the drawing-room so that he might say good night to her parents, but the room was empty. Only a single shaded lamp had been left burning, and the fire on the hearth was flickering to ashes.

“I suppose papa’s at the club, and probably mamma has gone to bed,” said the girl, in the hushed tone that dark and emptiness induce.

She drew away from him to a distant dim corner, from which her face shone palely like a white flower in the night.

He obeyed, and all at once her slender arms were about his neck, pulling his head down, her fragrant hair was against his face, and her lips were pressed to his in such a willing kiss as she had never given him before. It left him trembling from head to foot. His heart beat madly. He could not speak.

But she could. “Now will you forget me, Stacey?” she murmured, with a low mischievous laugh.

Whatever she felt, it was certainly not what he was feeling. Well, that was right. He was glad of that—he supposed.

In the hall, however, she did not laugh. “Oh, Stacey,” she said, “come every day until you go! Come twice a day, three times! Come all day long!”

When he reached the sidewalk a woman, muffled in a heavy fur coat, came toward him. “Mrs. Latimer!” he cried out in surprise, when she was close to him.

“I wanted to speak to you alone, Stacey,” she said. “So when I heard you leave the library I slipped on a coat and came out here.”

Stacey was genuinely touched, but also apprehensive—as one always is toward the mother of one’s fiancée—for fear that she was going to reprove him for something in his behavior to her daughter.

“Oh, but I’ve kept you a long time!” he stammered. “Aren’t you cold?”

“Stacey,” said Mrs. Latimer, looking gravely into the young man’s face, “you’re going to the war.”

“I’ve seen it coming for many days,” she replied, “and to-night I was sure. You came to tell Marian.”

“Yes. How very, very good of you to want to speak to me and to wait for me here outside!”

She shook her head. “Come! Let’s walk up and down for a few minutes,” she said, and took his arm.

“Mrs. Latimer,” he begged, “you’re not going to tell me that I’m wrong? It’s been so hard for me to decide. You’re not going to tell me that I owe it to Marian to stay? It would be so sweet to stay!”

“Oh, no! Oh, no! no! no!” she replied. Then, after a pause: “How did Marian take it?”

“She was a dear!” he said loyally, but with a sinking feeling at his heart. “She has never been so kind to me before.”

He started. This was uncanny. But he felt resentment, too. “Marian is so fine,” he said a little stiffly. “She sees things in flashes. She looks through the—the ugly facts to the glory beneath them. I’m not a hero—I know it only too well; but Marian sees only the collective recognition that I and a thousand others are giving of—of—the existence of something deeper than facts—of an idea.” He shook his head, unable to express his thought, and uneasily conscious that he was defending Marian—not very well, either.

“My dear boy,” Mrs. Latimer returned, “please believe that I am not blaming Marian for anything. I recognize as clearly as you do all her fineness. Marian lives in a palace. And when you live properly in a palace, perfectly at home there, you have palatial thoughts. But, you see, I don’t live in a palace. I’m of coarser clay. You don’t know me very well, Stacey, but I know you, I think. And I felt I must see you for a few minutes.”

“But I don’t really know,” she went on, “what it is I want to say. Nothing, perhaps. Certainly nothing that is clear. The world is a welter of confusion.”

He nodded assent, feeling closely and comfortingly drawn to this middle-aged woman who had always seemed aloof to him before.

Mrs. Latimer did not speak again for several minutes. “How do I know what war does?” she continued at last. “How should you know, for that matter? But, Stacey, if it changes you in odd deep ways that you can’t conceive of now—nor I, either—don’t, please don’t, suffer too much and blame yourself for the changes. There’ll be so much suffering you’ll have to go through anyway that it would be a pity to add to it unnecessarily.”

“How in the world should you?” she replied. “I don’t, either. I only feel something rather vaguely. But there is one thing clear, my dear boy. I want you to be certain that you have a sincere affectionate friend in me, who will always try her puzzled best to understand you sympathetically. And that was really all I had to say.”

“Now take me home,” she added. “We must go carefully around the house and I’ll let myself in at the back door so that Marian won’t know I’ve been out.” She laughed. “Think of your having an assignation with your mother-in-law and having to conceal it from her daughter!”

But when Stacey had seen Mrs. Latimer safely enter the back door of her house, and was walking home along the deserted streets, though he felt warmed and comforted by her unexpected intelligent friendship, he also felt an uneasy sense of disloyalty, as though he and she had become accomplices in a secret league against Marian.

Stacey arrived in New York one afternoon about a week later. His boat was to sail the next morning. He went to the small hotel on Tenth Street where he always stayed.

Stacey wasted no time, but dropped his suitcase in his room and set off immediately up-town on the top of a motor-bus.

It was clear dry weather, not too cold, and the city’s buildings stood out sharply against a brilliant sky. Stacey had never liked this glittering hardness in the atmosphere of New York. The Metropolitan Tower wouldn’t be so bad and the Woolworth would be bully, he had often thought, if only they would soar up dimly into a softening haze, as they would in Paris. The whole show was good, but not good enough to stand this crude vivid light. Nothing could stand it—neither façades nor human faces. It was like an immense close-up at the movies. And to-day, since he continued to feel about him and within himself so much confusion, this effect of physical clarity really made him uneasy.

But the discomfort soon faded and he thought only that he was to have this whole afternoon and evening with Philip Blair. He took the stuffy elevator in the Harlem apartment house, stepped out, and hurried down the dark hall to Philip’s door with no other feeling than gladness.

Philip himself opened the door, and his face showed as warm a pleasure as his guest’s. He was thin and slight almost to emaciation, with keen prominent blue eyes, a sharp-cut nose whose nostrils seemed to sniff like a dog’s, and a short fair moustache. He looked like a medieval ascetic, superficially modernized. Just at present he was in shirt-sleeves and held a pair of compasses in one hand. With the other he shook Stacey’s eagerly.

“By Jove, I’m glad to see you!” he cried. “But why do you give me only a day? Why didn’t you come and stay a week? Come on in!” And he led Stacey down a narrow hall and through the dining-room into his study.

“Couldn’t do it,” Stacey replied on the way. “Whole business so sudden.”

“What you working on?” asked Stacey, leaning over the drawing-board in the study and fumbling abstractedly at the same time with a pile of sketches that lay, curled up anyhow, on a table close-by.

“Public library for a village,” said Blair, pulling a sketch of the front elevation from the rattling heap of papers, spreading it out on the board, and holding it down flat.

Together they leaned over it. Stacey nodded. “Fine!” he said. “Awfully good! Let’s see. It’s not for a New England village. Where is it for? Pennsylvania?”

Stacey continued to examine the drawing, then began to smile, poked his finger at it with a wide curving gesture, and finally broke into a frank laugh. “Always the same old Phil!” he said gaily, dropping into an easy chair. “Quite incorrigible! Don’t you ever remember how many shameful ‘Hors Concours’ you were always getting at the Beaux Arts, and how disapprovingly old Fromelles used to shake his head over your projets, and what they all used to think of you: ‘Too bad! Just a little vulgar! Just a little vulgar!’ ”

Blair laughed with him, but after a moment Stacey became suddenly silent and gazed with a puzzled frown at his friend, wondering how it was that any one so physically frail as Blair could possess such creative masculine vigor of mind.

Blair shrugged his shoulders. “Oh, all right enough,” he answered lightly. “I scrape along without too much difficulty. It would be easier in one way if I were to go in with some firm, but—”

“Never do—for you, never in the world!” Stacey interrupted, shaking his head. “You’d feel crushed.”

“Yes, I’d rather go it on my own. I’m all right. Absolutely the only thing that bothers me is not getting enough jobs. I don’t mean because I need them financially, but because—you know how it is—to learn, a man has to see his work in actual stone and brick.”

“You’re too damned good!” said Stacey hotly. “You’ve got the real stuff in you. Here am I, prospering like a—like a pork packer, while you struggle along unappreciated; yet you’re a thousand times better than I.”

“You’re too generous and loyal, Stacey,” Blair returned, with a shake of his fair head. “I couldn’t ever reach your delicacy in detail.”

“Detail, yes,” Stacey muttered. “I—” He, too, shook his head, while his friend gazed at him with a calm clear smile. “Lack of vulgarity is the curse of more places than the Beaux Arts,” Stacey concluded suddenly. “There’s a brand-new thought for you—brand-new so far as I’m concerned. Make what you can of it, Phil.”

Philip Blair laughed. “Sounds interesting,” he said. “I’ll have to think it over. Anyhow, you needn’t worry about me. I manage to scrape enough together to live and keep Catherine and the boys going.”

After this a silence, that perhaps both young men had felt lying in wait, descended upon them. Blair was the first to meet frankly what it stood for.

“Well,” said Blair slowly, after another pause, “I suppose, in view of the tremendous issue, I ought to feel principally gladness that one bit more of strength and courage is thrown into the right side of the balance. But, do you know, I don’t—I can’t. Perhaps it’s because I’m not big enough to get away from personal feelings. And yet I don’t think it’s merely that. The truth is, Stacey, that you and I are individualists. We were born like that and we’ve been brought up that way. The profession we’ve chosen is individualistic—not perfectly so, because we have to meet the ideas of our clients; but a good deal so, all the same. For the very fact that people in general are so standardized, unindividual, wanting in ideas of their own, makes them leave pretty much in our hands the houses they hire us to build for them.”

Stacey was smiling. He recognized with affectionate amusement a characteristic of his friend’s mind—that inability to leave any side issue of a theme unexplored before pursuing the main theme onward. How different from Stacey’s father! And also how honest and thorough! Most people thought that Philip had a wandering mind. He knew better.

For Philip always did come back to the theme. He was back in it now. “We’re against the current,” he was saying sadly. “The whole trend of the world is overwhelmingly toward collectivism, doing and feeling in common, standardization. And yet—and yet—the unit is the individual; it can’t ever be the group. The individual’s a fact. There you have him, complete, a world—his only one—to himself. The group’s a fiction, a composite photograph, lifeless. Oh, I know the whole trend of things is wrong and that we’re right—so long as we harness our individualism and don’t let it grow into a silly cult.

“Right?—wrong?” he went on musingly, staring off through the window. “What do I mean by right and wrong? Well, I mean, I suppose, creatively valuable, creatively harmful. And the war’s going to rush and swell the advance of collectivism. No more art, no more thought, no more real life! Not till long after the war is over. You’ll see.”

Well, it was what Stacey himself had told his father. But he hadn’t perceived all that it meant. That was what you got for being impressionistic instead of thorough, he told himself humbly.

Blair turned his eyes back slowly to his friend. “And that,” he concluded, his thin face drawn with an expression of pain, “is why—though I know you’ve got to do it, and though I’d do it too, if I had the bodily health—that is why I feel, above all, grief that you must throw yourself into that inferno of awful physical and worse mental suffering. Forgive me!” he cried remorsefully.

But the shadow that had come over Stacey’s face was not there because of the prophecy of pain. Stacey was thinking of the contrast between Philip’s words and Marian’s. “That’s all right, Phil,” he said quietly. “It wasn’t what you said that bothered me. It was something else. Of course I know what I’m going into—so far as one can know through his imagination about something totally outside his experience. It’s a great deal better to think of it beforehand and be ready.”

They dropped all talk of the war after this; and before long Philip’s sons dashed in. Jack, the younger boy, who was two-and-a-half, ran at once shyly to his father; but the older, who was five, gave his hand to Stacey with a pretty confiding cordiality.

“How do you do, Uncle Stacey?” he said, with childish formality, recently enough learned to demand care and effort.

“Hello, Carter,” returned Stacey, who liked the boy and liked being called uncle.

The child leaned against his knee. “Uncle Stacey,” he exclaimed, his soft eager face glowing, “will you do ‘Fly away, Jack! Fly away, Jill!’ for me? I think I can find them this time. I think I know where they went.”

Philip Blair laughed. “Having achieved formality,” he said, “he puts it behind him at once. ‘Something accomplished, something done, has earned a night’s repose.’ ”

“Quite right, too,” Stacey replied. “I promise I will after just a little while, Carter. Where’s your mother?”

“Here,” said Catherine, coming through the doorway. “It was windy out. I had to fix my hair.”

“Let’s go into the sitting-room,” she said, in the abrupt way she had of speaking. “There’s a pleasant fire in there.”

But when they had sat down in front of it they all became silent—all, that is, save Jack, who, on the floor with his toys, babbled to himself ceaselessly of a thousand important things. Even Carter was silent. He sat on a foot-stool and gazed at Stacey from a little distance with patient expectancy.

Stacey, however, had forgotten him. A dozen thoughts were moving through the young man’s mind, yet not turbulently, but smoothly, without interference, like ships on a wide river. Perhaps this was because he was not thinking of himself at all, but of Phil and Catherine. He looked at Catherine, sitting there across the hearth, she, too, apparently far away in thought, and tried to study her objectively. She was tall and dark and handsome, with high cheek-bones, a high forehead, and black eyes set deep beneath long sweeping lashes. She had a magnificent figure, lithe, supple and without opulence—slender, even,—but making evident the large bony structure. So, too, with her head. It was like a firm Mantegna drawing, revealing clearly what lay beneath the smooth close-textured skin. Therefore in repose her face appeared even stern. There was something sculpturesque about Catherine.

But these things were externals. What was she really like? Stacey could not discover. In all the years that he had known her, first as Philip’s fiancée and then as Philip’s wife, he had never got beneath her intense shy reserve. Yet—which seemed odd—there was no sense of constraint between them as long as Phil was there, too. Stacey could talk impersonally with her, or, better still, sit for a long time silent with her, as now, perfectly at ease and sure that she, too, felt at ease. That was all, though. He could not understand the marriage. Still, he recognized that it was a happy marriage and he admitted loyally that a man very rarely did understand his most intimate friend’s choice of a wife.

Sometimes, he remembered, he had tried to sum up Catherine and her relation to Phil impressionistically. Once he had told himself that she was like a castle and Philip like a wind blowing around it, rattling the shutters but leaving the castle permanent and unchanged. But he felt a touch of impatience now in the recollection of that judgment. He had always been full of such fancies. Perhaps he had even cultivated them and felt a small pride in them. Somehow, in these last weeks he had come to feel almost antipathy for these baubles. What did they really explain? What good did it do to catch a mood, even truly? What was a mood but an evanescent unrelated thing?

But distaste for oneself does not suffice to alter one’s nature. Stacey did not perceive that his present musings had the same quality they disapproved of.

Philip laughed, but his visitor started. “Oh, Carter, old chap,” he said remorsefully, “I forgot all about Jack and Jill! I’m ready now. Come on over.”

The child ran to him delightedly, all the ages and ages of tedious waiting forgotten at once; and Stacey took a postage stamp from his pocket, tore it carefully in half, and gummed the pieces to the nails of his two forefingers. Experience had taught him that stamps were safer than scraps of ordinary paper, which had an embarrassing way of coming off.

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.

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.

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.

CHAPTER 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 I what? (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, what can a fellow say in these circumstances? Come along! Come on in! Hurry up about it!”

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.

“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.

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.”

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?”

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—”

“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 about that,” 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.

“That’s what war is,” Stacey replied. “One blunder after another. The side which makes the most blunders loses. A trite thought, but true.”

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 four P.M. I received orders to attack the position in front of us—sweet little hill, picture-puzzle of machine-guns—at five A.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.”

“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.’ ”

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?”

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!”

“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 wrong was done. Hundreds of thousands of you went to war nobly to right it. Belgium was invaded, 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.”

“And then,” he returned, “you went on existing somehow, impersonally, without any emotions—”

“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 is real light. 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.”

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 I don’t want 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.”

CHAPTER II

“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.

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.

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. “You look 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.”

“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?”

“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. “He was so 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, “it was a good deal of a bore to go through all that training and then never have a chance to use it.”

“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 to have got across and have had 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., of course!’—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 seen their soil invaded, their towns 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.

Stacey shook his head. “It would have cost thousands of lives more,” he remarked, helping himself to almonds.

“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.”

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.

“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—”

“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!”

CHAPTER III

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.

Stacey glanced the letter through swiftly, folded and addressed it, and laid it on the desk.

Waking early the next morning he did not lie still through those moments of delicious indolence in which most men indulge themselves, but slipped out of bed immediately and into his cold bath.

His body responded to the shock glowingly. It was magnificently fit. The muscles of his back and abdomen rippled smoothly as he rubbed himself with the rough towel. One would justly have admired Stacey as a healthy handsome animal. And it may be that his obstinate distaste for speculation, his barely conscious, undeliberate desire to avoid thought, arose out of his animal instinct of self-preservation, was but the deep determination not to allow his strong sane body to be affected by his sick and twisted mind.

He took from the closet a pre-war suit of his, a soft gray, civilian suit, and in regarding it felt a keener joy than he had felt in stepping off the steamer or in seeing Phil and Catherine or in drinking champagne last evening—a keener joy, alas, than he felt when he had donned the clothes; for they did not seem natural and easy to his militarized body.

Then he went downstairs and out of doors into the well-kept garden. It was still only seven o’clock and nobody was about—not even his father, who was an early riser.

But Mr. Carroll did presently appear. “Well, you are changed, Stacey!” he called jovially, as he drew near through the tall rose bushes. “Seems to me I remember the time when for you to get down to eight o’clock breakfast was—hello!” And he surveyed his son critically. “Back in civilian clothes already, eh?” he observed meditatively. “Well, that’s right, I suppose. You are a civilian again, of course. And I don’t think much of these lads who go flaunting their uniforms about for months after they’re out of the service, determined to wring the last drop of credit from their performance of duty. Still . . .” He paused. “Well,” he concluded cheerfully, “there’s one thing. You can put on all the civilian clothes you like, but nobody with half an eye would be deceived. You don’t look like a civilian. You look like a soldier.”

His father laughed. “Come on in to breakfast. Do you still eat that idiotic excuse for a meal you used to—coffee and two bites of a roll?”

After breakfast Stacey drove into town with his father, but left him at the door of the Carroll Building and walked briskly along the street until he came to the building in which Parkins and May, the architects with whom he had worked before the war, had their offices.

He was asked his business formally by the office-boy, new since his time, but waved him aside and opened the door of Mr. Parkins’s private room a little way.

“Yes?” said Mr. Parkins. “Oh, by the Lord! it’s Stacey Carroll! Come in! Come in!” he cried, rising and holding out his hand.

Stacey was pleased at the welcome. There exists between people who have worked hard together a camaraderie, approaching affection, but pleasanter since it makes no demands on expression. Stacey felt it for the men of his battalion; he had forgotten that he felt it for any one else. The rediscovery was a small pleasant surprise. He shook the architect’s hand cordially.

“Of course I saw by the paper this morning that you were back,” Mr. Parkins was saying, “but I’m blessed if I expected you to get around here to-day.”

“Thought I’d drop in,” said Stacey, collapsing lightly into a chair. “How are you?” And he scrutinized the older man’s shrewd clean-shaven face, which showed around the eyes little worried wrinkles, brought there by the perpetual endeavor to reconcile clients’ ideas with some modicum of architectural consistency.

“Pretty well! Pretty well!” Mr. Parkins replied. “These have been lean years, as you know. No building to speak of. But we’ve got all we can do again now and more too, even though the cost of material and labor is so high you’d think it would be prohibitive. But a good many people have made a good deal of money, and, after all, houses have got to be built. There aren’t enough to go round. We surely can use you, Stacey.”

“H’m!” said Stacey. “Sorry to disappoint you, but I’m out of the running for a while. Not coming back.”

“You’re not! Oh, now, look here! May and I talked it over and decided we’d offer you a junior partnership right off the bat, and now you—what’s wrong?”

“You’re awfully kind,” said Stacey, “but honestly I can’t—and I swear I don’t know why. I give you my word I couldn’t draw plans for a—bill-board at present.”

“Sorry!” Stacey remarked. “But that’s the way it is.” He smiled ironically. “All this returned-soldier-restlessness stuff, you know.”

Mr. Parkins considered him closely. “Now what have you gone and done to yourself?” he observed at last. “You look like Stacey Carroll, yet you don’t seem quite like him. I believe,” he added, with a laugh, “I really believe I’m half afraid of you. You’re a—”

“Little changeling, yes,” said Stacey, bored. “Now listen, Mr. Parkins,” he went on quickly. “There’s something I want to ask you to do for me. It’ll be a favor to me and a good turn to yourself at the same time.” And he stated Philip Blair’s case, without mentioning his name.

“Well,” said Mr. Parkins thoughtfully, “it might be done, of course. We’ll need a new man, since you’re not coming back for now—confound you! But what we need is a good safe man. Is your friend—what’s his name, by the way?”

Mr. Parkins uttered an exclamation. “Oh, I’ve seen his work!” he said. “Happened on a perfect wonder of a library he did in a small New York town. The villagers disliked it immensely. I asked about him afterward. He’s the real thing; but the idea of your recommending him to me as a safe man! It’s outrageous!”

“He’ll be as safe as you like,” Stacey insisted. “Five years of what he’s been trying to do would have crushed the danger out of an anarchist. Try him.”

“Well,” said Mr. Parkins, “I will. I’ll try him, because I think it’s a shame a man like that should be so hard pressed, but I know I’m making a mistake. You can write Blair that if he wants to come I’ll give him twenty-five hundred a year on a year’s trial.”

An odd spasm contracted Stacey’s features, but passed at once. “Oh, but I say,” he protested, in a dead emotionless voice, “you were giving me four thousand before the war!”

Mr. Parkins shook his head. “I’ll make it three thousand, but not a cent beyond,” he said firmly. “Philip Blair’s a genius. A genius isn’t worth more than three thousand to me.”

At three-thirty precisely Stacey was at Marian’s house. He knew he had a problem to face, since it was unfortunately true that he had no love left for Marian and did not desire to marry either her or any one else. But he had no plan and he had not said to himself that he would not marry her. He had not said anything at all to himself. He merely went to her house as per schedule. All that he felt was a sense of something burdensome—and just a little faint curiosity. After all, he had loved this girl once upon a time. That was it. “Once upon a time” exactly expressed it. It was the way you began fairy-tales.

He was relieved, if so slender an emotion can be called relief, that it was not Marian who opened the door of the house to him. He had been a little afraid that Marian herself would welcome him with an impetuous rush. But the door was opened by a maid—and not even the one the Latimers had had in the old days, at which also Stacey somehow felt relief.

He went into the drawing-room, hoping to find Mrs. Latimer there; for, besides feeling that her presence would put off the demand for emotional moments, he really did want to see her. But she was not there. The room was empty.

He went over and stood with his back to the fire-place and looked around him, an odd smile drawing at one corner of his mouth. For again he was feeling the weak futile tug of old discarded emotions. These vases and chairs and statuettes, the whole familiar setting of the room, reminded him of what he had once felt in their presence; which is the same as saying: what he had once been. Stacey was like a boat floating on the water, almost solitary, almost loose, but not quite; still attached by a frayed cord or two to his old self.

But the portières at one end of the room were parted gently, and Marian stood between them.

Stacey caught the soft sound and saw her at once. But, as he gazed at her, he continued to smile the same smile.

Nevertheless, what he felt was mixed. He was straightforwardly contemptuous of her melodramatic behavior, unexpectedly struck by her fine beauty, and stirred uneasily by memories.

Well, that half pleasurable discomfort is all that most long-parted lovers truly feel on meeting again, no matter how earnestly in letters they may have lashed their old emotion to keep it awake. But, since, even though changed, they are still they, the discomfort readily grows again to love in the renewed proximity.

Not with Stacey. He was no longer Stacey Carroll, 1914. He was a different person. His discomfort faded, flickered and went out—all in the brief moment of silence.

“You certainly are beautiful, Marian,” he said appreciatively, but without moving.

“Well,” she returned, with a ripple of laughter, “I’m glad you still think so—and feel so sure of it.” She moved slowly forward a few steps, toward him.

His mind was quite clear now and working swiftly. He thought rapidly that five years ago this demeanor of Marian’s would have set his heart to throbbing with delight. He would have likened Marian to a shy, half tamed bird, fond yet afraid of being caught. What an idiot he had been! To-day he coldly found her behavior absurdly affected. All these little airs and graces! Fiddlesticks! But, far more strongly than admiration of Marian’s beauty and cool scorn of her coquetry, Stacey was feeling elation, because it was now obvious to him that she did not love him, probably had never loved him. Frank love would not accord with these mincing ways.

Stacey crossed the room to a divan and threw himself down easily into one corner of it. “Come on over here, Marian,” he said comfortably.

She stood still and looked at him, half archly, half in a puzzled way. “Stacey, you are—you are the most ardent lover!” she exclaimed.

“And you!” he retorted calmly. “Let’s sit down and talk over our passion.”

Marian flushed and gave something like a pettish stamp of her small foot. “I won’t!” she cried.

However, she seemed to think better of it, for she did come slowly to the couch and perched herself on the end opposite Stacey. She sat there gazing at him, one foot on the upholstery, elbow on knee, her small pointed chin resting in her cupped hand.

Stacey, still smiling, considered her. “You’re perfect like that,” he said sincerely. “Some Greek sculptor of the Fourth Century—no, the Third—ought to have carved you.”

She started up. “You’re horrid!” she cried furiously. “Each time that I ask you a question you ask me one in return. I’ve waited for you—nearly five years—and this afternoon I looked forward to your coming and sent everybody out of the house, and then when you come you look at me as though I were an objet d’art and laugh at me—laugh coldly at me!”

“Not at you, Marian,” he said quietly. “I couldn’t laugh at you. I find I don’t know you at all. Come! Forgive me for being rude. Let’s talk everything over soberly.”

She sat down again and looked at him hostilely. “I see now why you didn’t write oftener,” she said haughtily. “I thought it was because you were too busy. Fancy!”

“No, you don’t see,” he replied, “and it’s difficult for me to explain, because I don’t understand very well myself. Also the subject’s distasteful to me. But I owe it to you to try to explain.”

He nodded, unimpressed by her tone. “It’s like this,” he went on, with an effort. “You’ve got to see me straight. And if I’m brutal, why, so much the better for you. I’m not only not the laurel-crowned knight of your flattering princess’s fancy. I’m not even the person I really was before I went away. Every bit of sweetness and light has been burned out of me. I don’t get delicate soft sensations out of anything any more. The overtones that you love don’t exist for me. Nothing has any glamour. All I can see in life is a mess of bare conflicting facts, stark naked.”

Stacey had forgotten Marian. His eyes glowed and there was a stern beauty in his face. Yet he was only leaning abhorrently over the upper edge of the well. He missed almost everything of importance.

While he spoke, the girl’s features had lost their expression of chill aloofness. Her lips were parted now, and she gazed at him as though fascinated.

“And if I tell you that I don’t love you,” he concluded fiercely, “I can honestly swear that it’s just that I don’t—can’t—love any one or anything. My saying so shouldn’t hurt anything but your pride, because you don’t love me, either.”

She leaned toward him ever so little. “How do you know I don’t love you?” she demanded softly.

“Because you create a setting, play a game, surround our meeting with little tricks,” he returned, quite unmoved by her coaxing grace.

She gazed at him intently, her breath coming and going rapidly. “Then you don’t—you truly don’t—even want to kiss me?” she asked.

He returned her gaze. Her coquetry did not stir him; her beauty did. “Yes,” he said somberly, “of course I do! But not because I find you shy and alluring. I don’t. Just because you’re beautiful and desire’s a fact.”

He seized her small wrists and drew her toward him slowly. She struggled fiercely at first, but then, when her face was close to his, yielded suddenly and returned his kiss.

“If you say anything more of that sort,” she burst out, “I shall hate you!”

She gazed at him strangely, an expression of cruelty in her fine mouth. “Ames Price has been imploring me—for two years now—to marry him,” she said slowly. “I think I’ll do it. Would you mind, Stacey?”

He winced. “Mind? Of course I’d mind! Animal jealousy, too, is a fact—nasty fact like all the rest of them! But go ahead and marry him if you’ll be happy with him.”

Her eyes shone for a moment with triumph. Then she laughed musically. “What a weird afternoon!” she observed, and pressed a bell in the wall. “Come! Let’s have tea. You’re quite Byronic, Stacey!”

Well, she was a sentimentalist, no doubt, but she was no fool, Stacey admitted to himself. Come to think of it, he was being Byronic in his intense antagonistic desire to stand alone, freed from all ties.

CHAPTER IV

Mr. Latimer was talking, although it was early afternoon and therefore not his best hour.

“The supreme importance of the arts,” he said, “is poise. There is no poise in life itself. Life is mere tumult and shouting. And since there is no poise there is no meaning. The arts hover above the hurly-burly, dipping down into it a little for delicate nourishment, but no more of it than a cloud, which sucks its constituent vapor from the earth, is of the earth. In the country of the arts there is quiet. That is to say,” he added drily, “there was. The arts at the moment have ceased to exist, and with them has vanished all that we possessed of value.”

But the beautifully enunciated phrases really gave him a feeling of contempt for Mr. Latimer. And he wondered how he could ever have admired this polished esthete. His glance wandered to Marian (the only other person in the room, her mother being out somewhere) who was curled up in a large chair on the other side of her father. Stacey considered the girl’s face attentively. She stirred him by her beauty, especially when seen thus, motionless, carved; yet left him, when everything was summed up, feeling actively hostile.

Mr. Latimer had taken a small vase from the mantelshelf and was toying with it abstractedly.

“Leisure,” he remarked, “is anathema to Americans. Yet leisure is all there is of importance. It is what all men strive to attain through labor, but, having attained, are incapable of supporting. It is too noble for their tawdry energetic minds, and they hasten to fill it up with meaningless movement. They even, I am told, go to witness what they call ‘photo-plays,’ where, though themselves sitting still, they can enjoy a vicarious restlessness and be saved from the leisure they dread. How false an understanding of life, or, rather, what complete lack of any understanding! The goal of life itself is, after all, just the eternal leisure of the grave.”

“An admirable epigram,” said Stacey, with no hint of expression in his face. “I cannot make out whether it belongs spiritually in the eighteenth century or in the nineties of the last century.”

“In any case it does not belong in the twentieth,” Mr. Latimer returned, a touch of irascibility in his voice. “Nor do I.” He set the vase down almost with a bump. “I must go,” he said. “I have an appointment, and here in America every one is always on time.” And he left them.

Marian uncurled herself gracefully. “Papa is cross,” she observed, with a laugh. “It is only three o’clock, you see. He does not approve of early afternoon. Let’s go to the library, Stacey. I don’t like this room.” And she danced off up the stairs, he following.

She half knelt on a window-seat in the library and gazed out, her mood seeming to change suddenly from hard to soft.

“The clouds drift and drift,” she said dreamily. “And sometimes they’re majestic and white with purple shadows, as now, and sometimes they’re black and terrible, and sometimes mere little pale ghosts of clouds. But they’re always clouds. They haven’t anything to do with real majesty or terror or ghosts. (Can one say ‘real ghosts,’ Stacey?) Only clouds. They just drift and drift. I think I’d like to be a cloud.”

“Why shouldn’t you want to?” he observed callously, “It’s your father’s theory all over again.”

She whirled around, her face mischievous. “Oh, how funny you are, Stacey! You won’t care for me any more. You’ll damn anything I do or say. You’re an enemy, out and out,—oh, yes, you are! Yet you’d be glad enough to kiss me this very minute.”

“But you’re not going to,” she said, with haughtiness. “Not now or ever.” She smiled. “Ames Price is coming to see me to-night. Shall I let him kiss me? It would make him so happy. I think it’s my duty to. Come! Let’s sit down and talk of duty, Stacey.”

And so she kept it up, as full of witchery as Circe, dazzling in the bright rapid flash of her moods, swift and lovely as a swallow, soft at one moment and clouded,—brilliant and gemlike the next.

Yet, through it all, Stacey, though he talked freely enough, was cold, distant and bored. He was like a man idly watching a sorceress draw circles and pentagons in the sand and murmur incantations. No spirits responded. No enchantment ensued. It was merely laborious lines and words, silly child’s play. The only thing that interested him—a little—in the performance was the question of whether or not it was deliberate.

Stacey had continued to go daily to see Marian. He remained unmoved by almost everything in her that had formerly delighted him. There was no longer any magic, any mystery. Yet he desired to be near her. Something she did give him. But as to what it was he did not inquire.

It was a strange relationship, but it is possible that Marian found it piquant. She seemed fascinated by Stacey, now that he was indifferent to her.

At last the girl sank lightly down upon an ottoman near the young man’s feet and gazed up at him, as on that day years before when he had come to tell her he was going to the war.

“You’re the oddest person, Stacey!” she said, her eyes shining. “Just like a great rock—a handsome rock. Why do you come to see me? You don’t need to, you know. You’ve broken our engagement—and my heart,” she continued elfishly. “I shall tell every one that you have. It will be in the newspapers. ‘Returned Hero Breaks Girl’s Heart!’ ”

This was better. There was something cool and hard in this that appealed to Stacey, wakened a sense of surface comradeship in him.

“H’m!” he remarked, smiling. “Your heart seems to be doing pretty well—if you’ve got one. Have you got one, Marian?”

“That’s a horrid habit you’ve acquired, Stacey,” she said gaily, “of never answering a question, but always asking another. I asked you why you came to see me. Well, since you won’t tell me, I’ll tell you. You come to see me just as you’d go to see the Parthenon.”

The smile faded from his face. By Jove, she was right! (Stacey Carroll, 1914, had been intelligently introspective; Stacey Carroll, 1919, could always be surprised if some one told him truth about himself. Also annoyed, generally. But not this time.) Yes, that was it, he supposed. The bodily fact of Marian wakened his atrophied sense of beauty—but differently than in the old days, austerely save for the touch of desire.

“Now when you can see things as straight as that why do you go in so for everything rococo?” he demanded harshly. “Why do you embroider and sentimentalize?”

She gazed at him, her mouth compressed, her eyes brilliant with anger—which was certainly justified. Then her expression changed and she shrugged her shoulders, gracefully.

“So you see,” she said calmly, “you were just asking a silly careless question a moment ago. You don’t care whether I have a heart or not.” She smiled again. “What an odd pair we are!” she went on. “Poor me! Not engaged any longer! Deserted after all these years! You must be sure not to tell papa until you’ve given me time to get engaged to some one else—Ames Price, I think you said I might marry. Papa would be too awfully angry.”

Stacey had of course seen Mr. and Mrs. Latimer more than once by this time. His old admiration for Marian’s father had gone, like so many other things. He found Mr. Latimer a cultivated futile gentleman with an interest in baubles and a talent for intelligent monologue. The only thing about him that awakened any interest in Stacey was a kind of irascibility that Stacey did not remember as formerly characteristic of him. Mr. Latimer was really sharp at times, in a suave polished way, with his daughter and his wife.

But Mrs. Latimer, though she had certainly aged, had clearly not done so because of such trifles; for she bore her husband’s occasional pettish outbursts with a pleasant detached tolerance. They might have been the outbursts of characters in a book she was reading, for all the effect they appeared to have on her.

She had welcomed Stacey with quiet happiness, and he had felt at once a comfort in her presence which he felt in that of no one else. Yet she had said nothing of importance to him, had talked of externals even the time or two that they had found themselves alone together for a few minutes.

He left the Latimer house rather early on the afternoon of this unsatisfactory interview with Marian. Something about Marian antagonized him strongly, even now that he was surely free; so that the impulse he felt to seek her society repeatedly in this way revealed a bond of some inexplicable sort and irked him.

He walked swiftly north till he came to the handsome park the entrance to which lay at no great distance from the Latimer home. And, plunging into the green shady paths, he felt a sudden relief. To cut loose from it all—all streets! all men! To be free! There was no joy for him in the full-leafed June beauty of the trees or in the bird songs among them,—no call to comradeship. Quite otherwise. It was solely as release that he instinctively welcomed them.

Striding aimlessly onward in this mood, Stacey suddenly heard his name called and swung about quickly to see Mrs. Latimer sitting on a bench at the edge of the path he followed and waving a green parasol at him.

“I couldn’t help calling to you,” she said pleasantly, “though I oughtn’t to. You look so splendidly alone, as though you didn’t want to see any one.”

“Oh, but yes,” he returned, “I’m glad to see you! No one else; but you!” And he sat down on her bench.

“Now what old woman could help having her head turned by that?” she exclaimed, with a smile.

He scrutinized her face. Yes, she had grown older, he thought, but not ignominiously; in some way that made age seem of value. Even in regard to her Stacey was not curious as to what experiences of body or soul lay beneath the changes her face showed; but he accepted what she was, as a gracious fact.

“Oh,” she observed, “so that’s why you were marching along with the air of being so glad to be alone! Have you broken—I mean, have you and Marian broken off your engagement?”

“Oh,” he observed suddenly, as an afterthought, but really with some little touch of human sentiment, “I hope you won’t feel hurt! I should be sorry to hurt you.”

“I?” Mrs. Latimer exclaimed. “Gracious, no! I’m immensely relieved. I wouldn’t have had you and Marian marry for anything in the world.”

Stacey did not know whether she was being a vixenish mother-in-law or an unnatural mother, but he found her remark amusing taken either way, and laughed. She laughed with him, but more gaily.

“Oh,” he added after a moment, “I forgot! Marian says we must be sure not to let Mr. Latimer know at present.”

“Of course not,” said Mrs. Latimer, as though it were too elementary a truth to deserve mention. “Marian’s much more intelligent than you ever gave her credit for being,” she added, an instant later.

“Yes, I know that,” Stacey admitted freely, even though he did not see the present application of the remark, or, indeed, why both Marian and her mother deemed it essential that Mr. Latimer should not learn that the engagement was off.

“Naturally,” said Mrs. Latimer thoughtfully, poking holes in the gravel with the tip of her parasol, “I could see that things were not the same as once. Well, that was to be expected. I shouldn’t have been at all surprised to have you show a kind of—of fond indifference to Marian. But what I don’t understand—there’s so much I don’t understand about you, Stacey—is the positive hostility I’ve felt sometimes in the looks you gave her. It was as though you hated her. Why? Poor Marian! She’s just the same as always. Is that itself—her sameness—the reason?”

Stacey reflected, painfully and with resentment at the need. Finally he drew his hand across his forehead and looked at Mrs. Latimer. An odd fanatical intensity glowed in his face.

“I don’t know,” he said, speaking thickly and with difficulty. “I hadn’t thought. But perhaps it’s—because Marian’s perfection is so—dependent on wealth. I see Marian,” he went on, his words suddenly pouring out, “as a flower that you get by fairly watering the ground with money. Put her by herself in the panting sweating world and what would she be? Her grace is money! Her ease—money. All her charm—money! Everything in her except her chiselled Greek beauty is money! I hate money!” And he fell into tumultuous silence.

“So that was it,” Mrs. Latimer said in a tired voice. “Poor Stacey! Confidence for confidence,” she added abruptly, after a pause. “Have you ever wondered why we gave up Italy and came here to live?”

“Often,” he answered, surprised. “I used to fancy it was your decision—your feeling that Marian ought to know America.”

She smiled oddly. “My decision! It would make no difference where Marian lived. She would never at any point touch the real world. No, it was not my decision. You see, our income, which was considered a tidy little competence at the time Mr. Latimer inherited it, remained stationary while the cost of everything grew and grew. America was expensive, but in it Marian could marry money—money, Stacey! And, of course,” she added, with a kind of bravado, “you were a splendid parti!”

Stacey felt sickened by the revelation. Oddly enough, five years past, when he had been incorrigibly romantic, it would not have disgusted him a tenth as much as now when he was stripped clean of illusions.

“I see,” he remarked. “So to-day, with the present cost of living, Marian simply must marry. What an economic waste to have thrown away these five years in waiting for me! Why do you tell me this, Mrs. Latimer?”

“Only because it’s a relief to tell somebody,” she replied, “and because you said what you did about money, and because I wanted to show you that one might feel as you did, with even more reason, and still live and be tolerably happy.”

“Very well, then,” she concluded desperately, “because truth is truth, and if I ever connived at anything against you I want to tell you of it.”

He started. “Where? In France? Oh, yes, of course,” he replied, in a matter-of-fact voice.

“I thought of you so often,” she went on. “It must be dreadful to be an idealist and then see all your ideals go—violently—one by one—”

“Crushed to death by facts—not average facts, all the horrible evil facts herded together and organized until they must have seemed normal!”

“Oh,” he said, “facts are facts! They aren’t either evil or good. And you’re much too polite in saying that I was an idealist. ‘Sentimentalist’ is the right word. Can’t say that the method employed to remove my illusions was particularly gentle, but I’m grateful enough for the removal.”

There was a look of pain on Mrs. Latimer’s face. “No! No!” she cried. “It isn’t fair! There’s good disillusionment and bad! It’s good to have false prettiness, false sentiment—whatever is false—scrubbed off, but it isn’t good, it isn’t fair to a man, to see only pain and death and agony and mud for four years and be made to feel that that’s all there is of true. It isn’t fair! It isn’t!”

Stacey’s face was pale but calm and touched with a distant haughty scorn of all things. “Oh, it wasn’t only that!” he said in a chill voice. “I doubt if that was even the profoundest lesson in disillusionment. That was the lesson of pain and brutality and ugliness and fatigue—incredible fatigue. It even had gleams of relief—flashes of lightning in chaos. Men showed themselves beasts, but with a capacity for enduring more suffering than you’d have thought possible. There was funk, of course,—individual cowardice and rank, bestial, mass terror, just as there was mass cruelty. But there was amazing heroism, too. And the men did carry on in spite of everything. Oh, no, the trouble with the front line was the senselessness of squandering so much life. The place to get real disillusionment—where you learned the senselessness and sordidness of life itself—was behind the lines, back where things were neat and pretty, where the officers had feuds over questions of personal prestige, and stupid fools gave orders disposing of men’s lives, and the peasants gouged the soldiers for all they were worth. Or back in Paris where the shop-keepers gouged every one. And the Y. M. C. A. with their silly sloppy Christianity—all for the best in the best of all possible worlds! Or down in Italy, where butter and sugar were rationed down to the minutest fragments and there wasn’t enough so that women and children could always get even those tiny rations, and yet some people had butter on their table in quantities three times a day and bought sugar in five-kilo packages at their back doors at six times the established price. And the American Red Cross with its silly pompous ‘majors’ and ‘colonels’ out for decorations! ‘Colonel’ So-and-So thought he’d been slighted, and ‘Major’ Thingumbob absolutely was going to be given a place on the balcony when that ceremony came off, by God he was or know the reason why! And the Committee on Public Misinformation! And no coal to run trains enough to carry the people who absolutely had to travel, and President Wilson coming to Rome with a million journalists!” He laughed harshly. “Or, for the matter of that,—America! I haven’t seen very much of it yet, but I gather—oh, I gather a great deal!”

Stacey paused at last. But he did not look crushed or dejected by his enumeration of abuses. He looked more alive than before. He looked like a young, evil, disdainful god.

It was Mrs. Latimer whose face was white. “Poor Stacey!” she murmured brokenly. “All true, no doubt, but not the whole truth! Poor Stacey!”

He frowned. “Wisps of old things hang around futilely and bother me a trifle—like soft fog around a ship, but I’ll get rid of them,” he said confidently.

She reflected for a moment. “Why do you want to be free?” she asked timidly. “What will you do with freedom, Stacey?”

“Do with it? Nothing! It’s an end in itself. Isn’t it aim enough to want to get rid of association with the kind of thing I’ve been chronicling?”

She shook her head. “It might be. It isn’t your aim, Stacey. And anyway one can’t be free. Oh, Stacey, forgive an old woman who is fond of you,—but you—you’ve come back a different person than you went away, and indeed you must, to live, follow that old, old advice: ‘Know Thyself’!”

“Haven’t I,” he said coldly, “been regaling you with reams about myself?”

She shook her head again. “You haven’t even scratched the surface. It’s late, my dear boy,” she added. “Please take me home.”

CHAPTER V

Philip Blair and Stacey had been hunting houses. Catherine and the boys were to come on when one had been found and enough furniture rented to live with until their own could be shipped.

Houses to let were scarce, applicants numerous, and rents high. But Stacey employed obstinate pressure and actually presented his friend with a choice of three. Which, better than anything else, indicates the position of the Carroll family in Vernon.

The thing was done, the lease signed, and the agent had left them; but Phil and Stacey stood for a little while on the wooden porch of Phil’s new house, looking down at the city.

Vernon was, for the most part, flat, but one hill of moderate eminence it did possess, which, in the narrow early days when the city was young and a man was deemed successful if he had at sixty amassed a fortune of a hundred thousand dollars, had been the supreme centre of fashion, as was evidenced by the towers (to say nothing of the lightning rods) on the now dingy frame houses. Stacey himself had lived on this hill when a small boy, and the school he had attended still crowned it. But those were the days when Vernon’s best citizens boasted that Vernon had a population of a hundred thousand (which it did not have). Now Vernon had two hundred and twenty-five or perhaps two hundred and fifty thousand, and its best citizens did not much care. The crowded business section had flowed to the foot of the hill and even burst like a wave upon it, spattering its slopes with small garages and second-rate shops. Noise rose and the odor of smoke. Fashion had long since departed—to the edge of the city, where the Carrolls lived, or still farther, to the hills that rose beyond.

Stacey withdrew his eyes from the prospect and glanced sharply about him at the porch, the steps, and the small front yard. “Sordid kind of place to have to live in,” he remarked. “Sorry I can’t get anything better for you.”

Philip Blair smiled his pleasant gentle smile. “You know you don’t think that, Stacey,” he returned. “You’re only saying what you take to be the proper thing. At heart you don’t feel that it matters in the least where one lives.”

“No, I suppose not,” Stacey assented absently. He was again staring off at the city. It stretched out, monotonous and unbroken save where the afternoon sunlight glittered on the two converging branches of its sluggish river.

“I wish,” said Phil shyly, after a pause, “that you’d let me thank you—for this whole business.”

“For God’s sake, don’t!” Stacey exclaimed sharply. “Thank me if I give you anything real—peace or—or freedom. Don’t thank me for anything to do with money!”

Indeed, he did not want to be thanked. Gratitude was a bond, the recognition of gratitude a bond.

Phil looked at him sadly, but Stacey did not see; his eyes were still fixed on the city.

“The solidity,” he muttered at last, “the damned solidity of it! Did you ever see anything like it?” he burst out, turning on Phil.

“Of that! Of the city! I didn’t feel it at first when I got back. It’s getting on my nerves now. There are churches in it where men preach at it, and lecture halls where men talk at it, and auditoriums where it’s sung at and played at,—faugh! Children with puffed-out cheeks trying to blow down a house! Why, look at it! It’s only sixty years old, yet it’s more eternally unchangeable than the Pyramids!”

“Well,” said Phil slowly, “what’s wrong with that? Why should it change?”

“Why? The whole world has gone through agony, has been wrenched and torn until not one atom of it, not one emotion, not one value, remains as it was,—and here is this damned ignoble changeless place that doesn’t know there’s been a war—or pretends not to know, so that it won’t be expected to change. Nothing can change it, I tell you,—but bombs!”

“But,” Phil asked steadily, “how do you want to change it? What do you want to do for it?”

“Nothing!” Stacey cried. “I don’t want to change it, either for better or worse. Nobody can change what a war like this couldn’t change. I want,” he concluded, his eyes glowing strangely, “to wipe it out, annihilate it! Bombs, I said. Nothing else is any good.”

A look of pain crossed Philip Blair’s face. “I think,” he said, “that you’re a little mad, Stacey.”

“Because it isn’t only Vernon you’d have to destroy. Everything’s that way—unchanging. It has to be, I suppose, to endure. People have their own lives. They can’t change so very much. Even mothers don’t die because their sons have died. They suffer for a while, then forget. Vernon and the Middle-West shock you now because they’ve been too removed and too unimaginative to suffer at the war. They’ve scarcely felt the war. While you’ve been in places all raw with pain. But they, too, will get over it and be like Vernon. It isn’t Vernon you’d have to destroy. It’s all humanity.”

Stacey’s face was inscrutable. Not a muscle in it had moved. But his eyes had grown dark with a kind of shadow. “Maybe,” he said again quietly. “Come on! Let’s go.”

They went down the steps and along the brief board-walk to Stacey’s car, which was parked before the house.

Dinner was at seven, and they were in the living-room at ten minutes to. It was the one admonition Stacey had given Phil on the latter’s arrival the day before. “Do as you please in everything—only be on time at meals,” he had said.

Mr. Carroll was waiting for them, with cocktails ready to pour. He was in a genial mood and nodded appreciatively at the younger men’s promptness. “Pleasure to have to do with people who understand that seven means seven,” he observed. “You wouldn’t believe, Blair, the trouble I used to have with Stacey. He was almost as bad as his sister in his contempt for time.” He poured the cocktails. “Make them myself nowadays,” he explained. “I have profound respect for Parker, but I don’t want to strain his integrity too much. You can’t even trust the men at the club not to rifle one another’s lockers. Not that Parker wouldn’t make a more creditable member than a good many of them.”

“Dare say,” remarked Stacey. “But now this question of being on time,—I can see two sides to it.”

“Two?” his father exclaimed. “Not a bit of it! There’s only one side.”

“No, it’s a matter of two opposing theories of life. One is that you should always be on time so as to avoid inconveniencing one another and wasting energy and having dishes get cold. The other is that you shouldn’t worry too much about promptness or you let time get the upper hand of you and run your life.”

“Fiddlesticks!” Mr. Carroll interrupted, “It will run your life more if you neglect it.”

“Yes, that’s a point for you. I knew an Italian family in Rome, delightful people,—several branches of the family there were—lived all over the city. They were always going places together en masse. But it took them forever to get assembled. Once they stood in the rain in three separate bunches in three distinct and distant parts of Rome because they’d all forgotten at just what time they were to meet and where. No, you’re a slave if you disregard time and a slave if you bow down to it. You’re had either way.”

“I rather think that there’s a little more to it,” Phil observed quietly. “I think Mr. Carroll’s side is right. It is better to be prompt. But not because you save time that way and are more efficient. Rather because you establish an apparent medium of smoothness to live in, make everything seem permanent, eternal and of value. To have the nine-seven train pull gently out of the Pennsylvania Station at precisely nine-seven gives you a feeling of confidence, a sense that everything’s going to be all right. An illusion, of course, but essential. A lot of bohemian marriages break up just because they don’t have it there, stable and making marriage seem stable.”

Mr. Carroll fairly snorted. “Stacey, I’m ashamed of you!” he cried. “Blair can’t live in a hovel like that. He can’t surround his children with all that coal-dust and noise.”

“I give you my word, Mr. Carroll,” Phil protested, “that it’s a lot better than where we’ve been living. I really like the place. I can run a lawn-mower in the evening.”

But the older man shook his head impatiently. “Now look here!” he said. “This house of mine is three times too big for Stacey and me, especially since Julie married. You bring your wife and children here to live—anyway until you can find something really decent or build if you decide to stay.”

Philip Blair flushed slightly. “I never heard of anything quite so generous as that, sir,” he replied, a trifle unsteadily, “but I can’t possibly accept.” And there was a gentle decision in his voice.

“Well, well, well! I’d have been glad to have you,” said Mr. Carroll, and dropped the subject.

Stacey recognized that his father’s offer was more than ordinarily generous, especially since Mr. Carroll liked to lead his own life. And he would have lived up to it, Stacey knew. He would have tried to crush Phil’s opinions into the mold of his own and he would certainly have been cross if Phil or Catherine were late at meals or showed Bolshevik leanings, but in his own way, and with externals, he would have been both impetuously and consistently generous. He would probably even have given Phil a key to the wine-cellar. All this Stacey understood, and with it his father. But his understanding was intellectual. He should have felt a warm glow, but he did not. The only emotion he felt was a faint sadness at feeling nothing. “Dead!” he muttered to himself. “Dead as they make ’em!”

At coffee time a friend of Mr. Carroll’s dropped in to play pinochle, and Phil and Stacey went upstairs.

But Stacey was restless. He wanted to see Marian and resented the desire—another bond that he could not shake free of. Moreover, he knew that in Marian’s presence he should dislike her. So the endurance of the desire was doubly exasperating. All this lack of harmony—even of common sense!

“I think I’ll go over to see Marian Latimer,” he said at last to Phil. “Be glad to have you come along. Really, you know.”

“Thanks,” returned Phil, “no. I’m a bit fagged. Quite sincere about it. Run along.”

“I’ll find out first whether she’s in,” Stacey said, and lifted the receiver of the telephone on his desk. They were in his study. “If she isn’t I’ll go to a movie,” he added, while waiting for his number.

He got the house and, after a minute, Marian. She laughed musically in response to his question. “Why, yes, come! Do come!” she said.

Her laughter made him angry—but not with her, with himself. It was not her recognition of her power over him that he minded. It was that power itself.

He walked to her house—a matter of a mile. He never used a motor car nowadays if he could get anywhere without one. Swift walking calmed the persistent fever of his blood.

Mr. and Mrs. Latimer were in the drawing-room, and he stood there for a few minutes, chatting with them.

“Marian is in the library,” said Mr. Latimer presently. “She left word that you were to go up as soon as you came.”

But he saw Mr. Latimer flash a sudden glance of anger at his wife, who, however, went on with her knitting calmly.

“So that’s the way the land lies,” Stacey reflected, as he climbed the stairs. “Papa has been told, or, more likely, has found out. Decent of Mrs. Latimer, very!” Nevertheless, he was unhappy.

She was curled up in her favorite arm-chair, and Ames Price was rising from a smaller chair near-by.

Marian gave Stacey a look of mischievous defiance. But he went over and shook hands with her so pleasantly and coolly that her eyes grew suddenly puzzled.

“Hello, Ames,” he said then, shaking his rival’s hand. “Haven’t seen you for years. How’ve you been?”

“First-class!” replied the other, eyeing Stacey doubtfully. “You look pretty fit.”

He was a tall, fair, loosely built man of forty, smooth-shaven and slightly bald. Stacey had known him in a casual way for years, but all that he really knew about him was that he had inherited money, had managed it well enough, was said to be a bit fast—but not excessively, and played an admirable game of golf. So far as Stacey or any one else was aware, there had been (except for golf) no passions in Ames’s life. Stacey felt a little sorry for him, that he should have been overwhelmed now by this one. Marian would make him uncomfortable. She would demand a great variety of emotions of him.

But, in spite of himself, Stacey also felt a hot jealousy. By Jove, Marian was beautiful!

“I suppose,” said Ames, with proper politeness, “that you must have had a pretty rough time in France. You were over the deuce of a while. I didn’t get across myself—division just about to sail when the Armistice came along.”

There was a touch of constraint in his tone. Stacey understood it at once. It was as though Ames had said: “You come back a hero. What chance have I got against you?”

“Oh, well,” Stacey returned, pleasantly enough, “that’s all done with now. Here we all are again. There’s no change in anything, really.”

He glanced at Marian. She was surveying the situation distantly, with a faint amused smile. Stacey’s own sensations beneath his calm demeanor were turbulent and mixed. He desired Marian keenly, hated to let her go, yet felt an antagonism for her that his desire increased rather than diminished. He was jealous of Ames, yet not in the least hostile toward him,—almost kindly, in fact.

Stacey considered him for a moment, then Marian, and in that moment wrenched himself free.

“No,” he said, “I believe I’ll go away—travel. Funny thing, but a long stretch of the war-stuff turns a man into a rather solitary animal. Maybe it’s the noise of the guns that’s shut him off for so long from companionship.”

He was not really thinking, except vaguely, of leaving Vernon, and had spoken principally to reassure Ames; for which uncharacteristically benevolent act he was immediately rewarded. The other man’s face relaxed from anxiety into an expression so blissful as to be silly. In spite of his conflicting emotions, Stacey could hardly keep from laughing.

“We shall all be awfully sorry to have you go, Stacey,” said Marian gently. “I shall, especially.”

This might be directed at Ames (Marian was certain to spend a great deal of time in hurting Ames), but Stacey did not think it was. For it was a simple remark, simply phrased. And Marian sat there, quiet, carved, thinking no doubt that Stacey liked her best that way.

Before long he rose to go. He would have liked to remain and look at Marian, but he had a well developed sense of fair play. Let Ames be happy! And deeper than this was the feeling that since he, Stacey, had decided for freedom he had better begin to act on the decision at once. That was it—act! do something! It was the only release from everything.

But when he rose Marian rose too, and accompanied him out into the hall, and closed the door behind her. Ames did not seem to mind. When Marian excused herself his rather vacuous face was as radiant as before. What more natural than that a girl should find it fitting to say good-bye to an outgrown lover of her early youth?

Ames would not, perhaps, have been so calm about it had he witnessed the setting and details. For outside the door Marian paused only for an instant to look up at Stacey, then, with a gesture of her hand to him, hurried down the hall a few yards, stopped abruptly at a door that opened off from it, turned the knob gently, and, giving first one swift glance up and down the hall, pulled Stacey a little way into the room beyond.

He gazed around him quickly. There was no light save that which came from the hall. It was Marian’s bedroom.

He turned on her and seized her wrists, his heart beating violently. But his hostility rose, wave for wave, with his passion. What a trick to play on him! Deliberate! Deliberate!

But she stood there, close to him, perfectly still, looking up into his eyes. The corners of her mouth trembled a little.

“Good-bye, Stacey,” she murmured faintly, when he had released her. “Don’t think I was—trying to hold you. I wasn’t. I only wanted to say good-bye—like this. I think you’re—right—and I won’t hate you—any more than I can help. Good-bye!” And, with another swift glance up and down, she drew him back into the hall.

But when she was already half way to the library door she turned and came back a step or two. Her eyes were wet, but her mouth had curved into a mischievous smile.

Stacey managed to leave the house without seeing either Mr. or Mrs. Latimer. He walked away swiftly. And when the confusion of his senses wore off he began to see into things a little more deeply than before. He saw his feeling toward Marian as it really was and as, he perceived, Marian had understood it—animal desire and love of beauty. Desire was a bond. It hurt to have it go. Stacey felt a painful emptiness, as though he had torn something violently from his heart. Yet he also felt a kind of exultation.

CHAPTER VI

Life in Vernon went on and on, and Stacey watched it proceed. But his attitude remained one of scornful indifference through which flickered occasional gleams of sudden eager interest, anger or hate. The perception of greed was one of the things that stirred him most frequently, and it grew within him until it amounted almost to a fixed idea. His hatred of money, its symbol, became fanatical. He would have renounced his own income entirely, except that he did not want to throw himself into the mêlée just yet, but somehow to see things through from outside—though through to where, he could not have said. As it was, he retained two hundred dollars a month and sent the rest to the relief fund for Viennese children. In this he was making no effort to live up to a principle, to conform himself to some ideal of life; if he had been, he would have sent all. He was, almost solely, striving for freedom from something he hated. Not quite solely, however, or why did he make this particular disposition of the money? He refused to answer the question. He would be free from what he loved as well as from what he hated.

One carefully covered-up aspect of life in Vernon did interest Stacey. Existence there seemed the same as formerly, people thought it was—though perhaps a few of them only pretended to think so; but at bottom certain fundamental relationships were shaken. Men paid eighteen dollars for a pair of shoes for which five years back they would have paid seven, or, not buying them, would next day have to pay twenty-three; women would offer sixty dollars a month for a maid, then not get her. The majority said that the cost of living was outrageous and servants scarce, and went superbly on as before. But Stacey grinned at them malignantly. He stamped on the ground and heard a hollow sound.

Therefore, although by this time his father talked to him almost with constraint and gave him often a wistful puzzled glance, Stacey himself felt a juster appreciation of his father than at first. Mr. Carroll was partizan down to the tips of his toes, but he did know that more was abroad than mere surface changes. His angry thought of Bolshevism was an obsession. And, knowing his father’s nature to be kindly and impulsive, Stacey gave him credit for something more than the mere desire to hold what he had got,—which Stacey thought he discerned beneath the vehemence of most perturbed capitalists—Colin Jeffries, for instance. No, Mr. Carroll was in arms for principles he believed in.

As for Stacey, he neither believed in them nor in those that opposed them. It was unfortunate. He would have been much happier if he could have thrown himself actively into the fray on one side or the other. Not because he craved human association; he did not. He was singularly solitary and aloof—with a white-hot kind of aloofness. But because he craved action.

There was strike after strike of labor in Vernon. They became almost the only subject of conversation. Even women discussed them, at teas or in their electrics as they drove to the movies. There was no coal for a while; then the workmen in all the mills struck; then the river dock-hands went out, and were promptly joined by the truck and dray men. This last strike tied up nearly everything.

Stacey was interested. He walked down to strike headquarters one afternoon and faced one of the sullen groups of men gathered in the dishevelled yard before the low brick building.

There ensued a rumble of hostile voices and some sharp cries. “Beat it, you bum!” “Get to hell out of here, you damned aristocrat!”

“Oh, shut up! I want to know,” Stacey said impatiently. “You must have some idea about it.”

The rumble became a roar, a man struck out at Stacey, and Stacey promptly knocked him down. There was a general mix-up during which Stacey was surprised to find a man—one of the laborers, so far as he had time to see—fighting efficiently on his side.

The police, who must have been close-at-hand, presently smashed up the affray and rescued the two, whereupon Stacey, rather battered, but happier than he had been for a long while, swung about to investigate his comrade-in-arms.

“The same, Captain,” said the other, instinctively raising his hand in salute, then dropping it again awkwardly.

But Stacey seized the hand and wrung it. Burnham had been first sergeant in one of his two companies.

Stacey gave his name to the police, observed that he was much obliged but that there was nothing to make a fuss about, and walked away with Burnham.

“What are you doing up here?” Stacey demanded. “Thought you lived in Omaha.”

“Well, I did. And my wife and kids are still there with my wife’s sister. But I heard there was good work with better pay up here, so I come up to see, and I was drivin’ a truck, and then the boys went out—”

“Oh, look here!” cried Stacey. “Then you were one of them! I swear I’m sorry! This will put you in bad with the others, won’t it?”

Burnham grinned. “They won’t exactly be coming around and begging me to have another drink of ginger extract on them,” he admitted. “It don’t matter, Captain, honest it don’t! I was going back to Omaha anyway.”

Stacey stopped walking and stared at him curiously. “Why on earth did you side with me?” he asked.

“I dunno,” said the other, looking down and shuffling with his feet on the sidewalk. “Habit, I guess. No,” he added, looking Stacey in the eye, while a dull flush spread over his face, “no, it ain’t that. I’d go anywhere you went, Captain, even if it was straight to hell. Pshaw, hell would be a song compared with some of the places I’ve gone with you!”

Stacey was touched and also disturbed. What a responsibility! Here was a bond with a vengeance!

“I’m blessed if I know why,” he murmured, and they walked on. “And yet,” he exclaimed suddenly, “you’ve been here in Vernon for I don’t know how long and haven’t even come to see me! Is hell the only place you’ll accompany me to? Have you got a special preference for it?”

Burnham hung his head. “Well, you see,” he muttered, “you’re such a confounded swell up here, Captain!”

Stacey again paused abruptly and turned on the man. “Damn you, Burnham, I’m not!” he cried. “What do you say that for?”

“Well,” said Burnham apologetically, “maybe you don’t want to be, maybe you ain’t, but I guess you’ll have a hell of a time not to be. Looks to me like every one’s gone back the way they was before.”

“Was that what the men down there had against me?” he inquired almost humbly, walking on once more.

“Sure!” Burnham assented. “The boys are all right, but they’re touchy. And you blow in, not meaning any harm—but they didn’t know that, not knowing you like I know you—and you ask them what the matter is, like a man giving orders, and they get sore.”

Sullen anger with himself crept over Stacey. It was all true enough. He had spoken to the men crisply, like one in authority. There was no use in explaining to them, or even to Burnham, that this was not because he was a Vernon Carroll but because he could not rid himself of the military habit of command in word and thought. There was no use in explaining anything to anybody. Bonds? He was tied hand and foot with them!

“They’re getting seventy cents an hour—my crowd, I mean. They want eighty.”

They continued, in silence, until at last they reached the Carroll house. Burnham paused to look up at it.

“Oh, you’ve been by here before, have you?” Stacey returned sharply. “Well, you’re not going by this time. You’re coming in.”

“Well, you can start for it from here as well as from anywhere else. Come now! March!”

“Pshaw!” he answered. “Nothing to it. Went down to strike headquarters to ask silly questions, and got into a baby fracas, as I deserved to. No casualties. No, I can’t tell you any more. There isn’t any more to tell.”

He took Burnham up to his study and made him sit down. “Now I tell you what we’ll do,” he said. “About nine-fifteen or so we’ll drive around to your boarding-house or wherever it is you’ve been living and pick up your things—”

Burnham was grinning. “Gee, Captain, you’re innocent, considering what kind of things you’ve been through!” he interrupted. “D’you think after what’s happened that I’d find any of my stuff there? I’d find a bunch of the boys waiting to beat me up.”

“Oh!” said Stacey. And, paying no heed to Burnham’s embarrassed protestations, he pulled a travelling-bag from a closet and packed it. “Oh, shut up!” he said finally. “Go into the bath-room there and wash. You’re even dirtier than I am.”

Presently the door of the study was thrown open and Mr. Carroll hurried in, red-faced and out of breath. “I’ve just heard,” he panted. “Did those damned scoundrels do you any—”

“Sh!” said Stacey, raising his finger to his lip, as Burnham came out of the bath-room. “Father, this is Burnham, my first sergeant—C Company—and as good a man as I’ve run up against. Incidentally, though he’s one of the boys who’re striking, he turned in and fought them with me this afternoon. Whole thing very silly. Neither of us hurt at all. Burnham will stay to dinner.”

Mr. Carroll looked at Burnham keenly and held out his hand. “I’m glad to know you, Sergeant,” he said.

“American Legion Veteran Attacked By Strikers!” announced the newspaper headlines next morning.

“The striking dock and dray men added another outrage to their intolerable behavior when they yesterday violently attacked former Captain Stacey Carroll, D.S.C., a hero of numerous battles in the late World War and son of Edward H. Carroll of this city. Captain Carroll had gone to strike headquarters at 13 Plumb Street at about five o’clock yesterday afternoon in a generous attempt to learn the men’s side of the case. His friendly questions, however, were met by a brutal assault. This time, however, the strikers mistook their man, and the only result of the attempted outrage is that Michael Dennis (24) has a broken nose, Vladimir Sarovitch (20) a black and blue facial coloring that improves his former appearance, while Lorenzo Cecchi (21) is in the City Hospital with a fractured wrist. The public will be relieved to learn that Captain Carroll is uninjured except for a few superficial bruises. Dennis and Sarovitch were arrested on a charge of assault and battery but were promptly released on bail, money, as is well known, being plentiful at strike headquarters.

“This brutal and uncalled-for assault upon a hero of the World War marks” . . . etc.

Stacey was infuriated. He wrote a sharp fetter to the paper, then, with grudging common sense, tore it up and wrote another milder one in which he protested that the whole affair was due to a misunderstanding and was anyway too unimportant to deserve mention in the press.

He went to the hospital to see Cecchi, a handsome dark-haired Neapolitan who stared at him angrily at first out of immense black eyes till Stacey apologized to him in Italian, after which the two conversed in that language with an increasing good humor that was heightened by their puzzled pauses over Stacey’s mistakes and Cecchi’s dialect. The interview put them almost on terms of intimacy. Stacey gave the Neapolitan, who had fought in the Battle of the Piave, some Austrian bank-notes printed in Italian for use in Venetia during the invasion, and Cecchi responded with a tiny silver medal of the Madonna.

But Stacey’s pleasant frame of mind on leaving the hospital was destroyed by his glimpse of the morning paper’s noon edition. His letter was there, but ruined by the caption above: “Captain Carroll’s Generous Reply—Makes Light of Cowardly Attack—Would Exonerate Strikers,” and by the fulsome eulogy of his behavior that followed. A vibrant editorial completed the wreck, insisting that while the personal magnanimity shown in Captain Carroll’s letter must appeal to every red-blooded citizen, the time had at last come when law and order must be . . . etc.

Without the slightest desire to align himself either on one side or the other, save that he felt a little more personal sympathy with the strikers, who anyway lived in touch with the few realities of life, than with their opponents, Stacey saw himself established irremediably as a Saint-George-like champion of law and order. He damned the press more earnestly than before. He lunched at the club with his father, whose eyes shone with approval of him, and he had, moreover, to undergo an ordeal of praise and congratulation from his father’s friends, together with briefer, less intense words from men of his own age. (The younger men, he told himself, were anyhow less grandiloquent nowadays than the older, though perhaps this was only because they were younger). Once or twice he tried impatiently to explain the silly business as it really was, but unavailingly. Anything he said was taken, he saw, as merely a further proof of his generosity. He gave up the attempt sulkily. Clearly his position was fixed. People had made up their minds about him, his reputation was solidly established, and nothing he might henceforth do could affect it. It struck him that the levity with which people acquired convictions would be ghastly if it were not so ridiculous.

Deserting the club with a feeling of relief, he wandered aimlessly about the city. But toward five o’clock, being caught in a sudden rain-shower, he took refuge in Philip Blair’s house.

As a matter of fact, there were other houses closer-by that would have afforded shelter, and it was at least partly from preference that he chose this one. He had not regained his old warm affection for Phil and Catherine, but their society was like a temporary balm applied to his fevered restless mind. No touch of greed was in them. They were, Stacey concluded, hardly human.

Phil had not yet returned from the office, but Catherine was at home with her two sons—Carter, now nine years old, and Jack, who was seven.

She welcomed him with her pleasant smile, that was like light shining coolly through an alabaster bowl, but also with characteristic constraint. She was only perfectly at ease with him when Phil, too, was present and less demand for expression was thus put upon her. “Shy,” thought Stacey once again. “Shy as Truth herself!” But he did not mind her shyness; he liked it. Being with Catherine was like bathing in a bottomless pool of clear translucent water. Fancies such as this, resembling those among which he had formerly lived so familiarly, came to him now only when he was with the Blairs. The fact should have revealed to him much that was obscure in himself; but it did not.

“Uncle Stacey,” cried Carter immediately, “I got A in arithmetic on my report in New York and A in reading and B-Plus in spelling!”

“C-Plus,” said Carter in a small voice. But his depression did not last long. “Uncle Stacey,” he exclaimed, “do ‘Fly away, Jack! Fly away, Jill!’ for him.” He pointed to his brother. “I bet he can’t guess the secret! I bet he’ll look all over the room for them!” And Carter grinned a delighted toothless grin.

“H’m!” observed Stacey, obediently making the necessary preparations, “I remember some one else who looked all over the room for them a few years ago.”

“I guess you mean me,” Carter replied. “Well, I guess I did. I guess I was awful stupid maybe.”

“Carter,” said his mother, with a laugh, “there aren’t that many ‘guesses’ in the whole dictionary.”

Presently Phil arrived. He looked tired with the heat, but his thin face brightened when he saw Stacey there playing with the boys.

“Stacey, you’re a fraud!” he said. “What sort of behavior is this for a misanthrope? You ought to be gloating over what Jack and Carter will grow up to be.”

Catherine put an end to the game and sent the boys out to play on the porch. “Yes,” she said, as she closed the door upon them, “I guess Stacey doesn’t mean all he says. I guess he’s really kind-hearted. I guess he likes children, maybe.”

Phil stared at his wife and smiled. “For heaven’s sake, Catherine,” he demanded, “what’s come over your English?”

Stacey laughed. “Corrupting effect of Carter,” he explained. “Yes, of course I like children.”

Stacey reflected, frowning. “Yes,” he replied at last, “I think so. Just one, a boy, so that I could try bringing him up.”

“Upon my word,” said the former, “this is delightful! Fancy finding you not merely humanly usual but positively universal—a bachelor with theories on education! What is your present theory, my son?”

Stacey smiled. However, it had become difficult for him to smile, and when he did so his face took on uneasy lines. He was not at his best when smiling. He was at his best when his face remained impassive and soldierly.

“Oh,” he said drily, “it’s a romantic enough theory, quite Rousseau-like. I’ve just invented it this minute. If I had a son I should take him to live in the country, in some place where the landscape was neither too grand, and thus apt to arouse vast disturbing aspirations in him, nor yet ignominious and depressing, like these dingy middle-western plains. I would have him live among trees, that are handsome and do no harm, and associate familiarly with a great many kindly simple-minded animals such as dogs, cows and horses, with a few cultivated elegant animals such as cats, and—less frequently and intimately—with one or two goats, who are old, sophisticated and skeptical, the libres penseurs among animals.”

“Well,” said Stacey dubiously, “perhaps now and then an occasional, very choice human, such as you or Catherine, just to show him what human beings can become,—but rarely, Phil, rarely!”

“Thanks, from Catherine and myself,” Phil observed, with a rather weary smile, “but I’d rather you’d select some one else. I should be profoundly unwilling to pose as an example.”

“And I!” echoed Catherine. “Besides, I shouldn’t have time. I should have to be getting dinner for Phil and the boys—just as I must do now.” And she rose. “I’ve not been able to find a maid yet.”

But Stacey, considering Catherine and Phil, perceived, with a softening touch of sympathy, that they were both very tired and that no doubt he had been adding to their fatigue. These two lived with a life of their own, apart, serene, modestly adding their few grains of pure gold to that appallingly small treasure which represented the sole remainder of all these ages and ages of human existence. Yet because they did so, thought Stacey, because they were clear pin-points of light in chaos, all life was against them, chillingly indifferent where not actively hostile. The blackness swirled about with a malignant, dully sentient desire to engulf and extinguish them. They were repaid for their foolhardy torch-bearing, their unforgivable sin of having some meaning, by being ground down beneath the sordid difficulties of bare existence. Ames Price, who played golf, or Jimmy Prout, who tried law suits, or Colin Jeffries, who handled a dozen corporations of no value to life, had carpets unrolled obsequiously before them as they walked; while Phil must wear his genius frayed on hack labor and Catherine must cook for her family in a small hot kitchen. “What a brute of a world! What an ugly perverse mess of a world!” thought Stacey, with a fierce sick disgust. Worth nothing! Its hard won treasure was too tiny to justify such a colossal grovelling incoherence.

But while Stacey was reflecting moodily in this manner Catherine had gone into the kitchen. Stacey could hear her there, moving pots and pans. Suddenly he sprang up and went out after her.

“Look here, Catherine!” he said. “It’s too hot to cook this evening! Come on out with me. We’ll all go and have dinner at a chop-suey place. The boys, too, of course.”

She looked at him doubtfully for just a moment, then smiled. “Thank you, Stacey,” she said simply. “That will be awfully pleasant. I think Phil is pretty tired. I’ll go and get the boys ready.”

CHAPTER VII

Stacey and Mrs. Latimer were having tea together. But, since Stacey had ceased to visit the Latimer home, they were having it at the “Sign of the Purple Parrot.”

This was a small but expensive tea-room recently opened on the fifth floor of a building close to the river front, and Stacey, as he entered it (for the first time), glanced swiftly about at its white walls, low white ceiling, small-paned windows with hangings of purple-figured cretonne, and at the purple wooden parrot on a tall standard in the centre of the room. A silver vase containing a single yellow rose decorated each of the ten or twelve little tables. Finally Stacey turned in mute amazement to his companion, since it was she who had suggested the place.

However, Miss Wilcox, proprietor of the tea-room, advanced toward them. “I’m so glad you’ve come early, before any one else, Mrs. Latimer,” she said, “because you can have one of the two tables out on the balcony. I’m sure you’d like that. They’re always the first to go.”

And accordingly they went outside and sat down in wicker chairs beneath a purple and white awning.

“Don’t you think it’s a nice idea,” asked Miss Wilcox, standing near them, “to try and use our river esthetically, Captain Carroll? It is Captain Carroll, isn’t it? I recognized you from your photograph. We’re honored to have you come. It seems such a shame to have this magnificent river and then use it solely for ugly business purposes. But that’s so often true in America, I think. Saint Louis is the same way. I should so like to have my modest little effort followed by others.”

Stacey said politely that he hoped it would be, and Miss Wilcox presently moved away.

“You mustn’t mind her, poor thing!” Mrs. Latimer observed kindly. “She’s devoted to her institution. It’s her child.”

It sweltered in the intense August sunlight. Barges and tugs moved up and down its sallow waters, and vast warehouses flanked it. Across on the further side was a train yard with multitudes of red freight cars, idle or with engines shunting them about. Trucks and drays rattled over the cobble stones of the streets leading down to the river (the strike having been settled some weeks since), and shouts rose and the odor of grease. And Stacey, turning away from it to order tea and scones from a capped and aproned maid who had come to his side, looked at her as though he did not believe in her.

“Yes,” she said, “it is silly, isn’t it? This painted parrot, and the tea roses, and the tiny, fussy, white-and-purple room, trying to make itself noticed by that immense fierce reality out there! But it doesn’t do any harm, and I thought the incongruity of it might amuse you. Where has your sense of humor gone, Stacey? Once you would have laughed gaily at this.”

“Where does a china tea-cup go in an earthquake?” he responded absently, looking down again at the river, then back at the room. “No, of course there’s no harm in it,” he said, after a moment, “since it is so obviously absurd, but you might, I suppose, take it as a fantastic caricature of something—”

But Miss Wilcox was seating people at the other table of the balcony. “. . . so often true in America, I think,” she was saying. “I should like to have my modest little effort followed by others.”

Mrs. Latimer smiled, but Stacey did not. He waited impassively until Miss Wilcox had finished speaking and had walked away.

“Now in the movies,” he continued, “you are presented with standards of behavior—sweetness and light, purity unsoiled, virtue triumphant, best of all possible worlds—that have nothing to do with real life. Seems impossible that real men and women could have posed for the pictures. You’d think the contrast with the promiscuity of their actual California divorce-court lives would be too strong. Not a bit of it! Well, that’s all right—if people like that kind of thing. Personally, I think it’s sickening. No matter how abominable real life is, I’d a thousand times rather have to live in it than in a Pollyanna, Mary Pickford, glad-and-tender world! Faugh!”

“So should I,” said Mrs. Latimer. “But if weary people find release in such tawdry fairy-tales—”

“Sure! Let them! Nobody’s business! But there’s the trouble. The silly stuff isn’t just taken as release. It gets accepted as truth. I mean to say, the ideals and standards are taken as those of real people. How in heaven’s name they can be by any member of a movie audience who knows anything about himself, I swear I can’t imagine, but they are.”

“Ah, but that’s the point!” said Mrs. Latimer gently. “They don’t know themselves. Even you don’t know yourself, Stacey.”

“I know enough about myself to see that I’m not like that. And what results? That any glimpse of truth is condemned as rotten, abnormal, pathological. For the movies are only a glowing example of a spirit that corrupts everything. Why, if a novelist were to take any man alive—I don’t say me, but somebody better—Jimmy Prout, for instance—and tell the whole truth about him, the ghastly things he did and the ghastlier ones he wanted to do but didn’t dare, what a row there’d be! The reviewers would call the book abominable, the hero a hopeless rotter, though every one of them has done or wanted to do things just as bad. A movie world, Mrs. Latimer! No truth in it!”

“Yes,” she said, “no doubt. I’d like it different, honester. But what harm does the pretence do? It even sets a standard of a sort, doesn’t it?”

“What harm?” he cried. “Why, it makes people shocked at German atrocities, as though they were sins committed by some alien inhuman monsters. Down with Prussianism? As much as you like! I’m glad we beat the Germans. So far, so good. But how about the Prussianism in ourselves? A movie world! A smug, lying, movie world!”

“But there is kindliness in it, too,” she said wistfully, “and generosity. I’ve met them both.”

“Yes,” Stacey assented somberly, “there is—in sudden impulses, more frequent, I’ll even concede, than these passing gusts of bestiality. But, so far as I can see, there’s only one real force, one motive, in life, that stays on and on and never dies. Greed!” he concluded fiercely.

“And still you don’t see it all,” she said at last very gently. “You won’t look deeply enough into yourself. If you did you’d see the splendid spectacle of the human soul fighting all this that you describe—and without quarter, dear Stacey, as long as you have breath in you. Has your hatred of greed and lies no significance?”

“I don’t know,” he replied, drawing his hand across his forehead. “And I don’t see that I’m doing any splendid fighting. I don’t know what to fight. I merely fume impotently.” But the wild look of pain had disappeared from his eyes.

He fell to wondering about his companion. No optimist, surely. Doubtful of most things, but sweet and mellow in her skepticism. How had she attained such serenity?

“You must know Catherine, my friend Philip Blair’s wife,” he said suddenly. “You will like her, and she you. There’s truth in the hearts of both of you, and yet you’re different, somehow.”

“When you do say pretty things, they’re pleasant to hear, Stacey,” Mrs. Latimer replied, with a faint girlish blush, “because you seem not ever to be saying them for effect.”

Soon they rose to go. Neither of them had so much as alluded to the fact that Marian was to be married to Ames Price in a few weeks.

That same evening Stacey attended a meeting of the American Legion. His life was like that now, inconsequential. He went pointlessly from one unrelated fact to another.

Being in a far from constructive frame of mind, he had nothing against the Legion and nothing in favor of it. It had indeed occurred to him that if an organization founded on no common conviction, but on the mere fact that its members had all been in the army, should come to exert political influence, that influence would certainly be confusing and might be harmful; on the contrary, if the young men who had been soldiers wanted to play together, why not? But these were idle thoughts. At heart he did not care one way or the other about the Legion. If he had shown more interest he might perhaps, in view of his record, have been elected commander of the post; but this is doubtful. He was a wealthy son of a wealthy father, and class antagonisms were not absent from the Legion.

Up to now he had attended only one meeting, but he had learned that to-night a protest was to be presented against the engagement of Fritz Kreisler to play in Vernon in the coming autumn; and Stacey, disgusted, was out to see if there was anything he could do to head off such nonsense.

It was a full meeting. There were several hundred men in the large hall when Stacey entered, and tobacco smoke hung over them in a dull blue mist. The commander of the post was already in the chair, and the business of reading minutes was under way. Stacey dropped into a seat and waited abstractedly.

He did not have long to wait. Excitement buzzed in a group near the centre of the room, and a young captain sprang up. Stacey knew him by sight. His unit was that to which Jimmy Prout had belonged. It had never left Camp Grant.

“Mr. Commander and Comrades!” he began tensely. “You know what I want to say. It’s about this business of letting an enemy come here and take our money, just as if nothing had ever happened. You know who I mean. I mean Kreisler. Kreisler was our enemy in the war. It doesn’t make any difference that he didn’t happen to fight against Americans or that he was out of it before we went in. He was on the wrong side. He supported the side that did all the—the atrocities you know about. And what I want to say is that if we’re asked to give him our support and our money it’s an outrage. And so,” he added, unfolding a paper, “I propose the following motion:

“We, the members of the John Harton Post of the American Legion, hereby express our amazement and strong disapproval of the action of the manager of the Park Street Theatre in engaging Fritz Kreisler, recently a soldier in the Austrian army, to play at a concert in the city of Vernon less than one year after the conclusion of a great war during which thousands of American lives were sacrificed to defeat the very principles that Herr Kreisler supported. And we hereby request the manager of said theatre to cancel Herr Kreisler’s engagement, and notify him that failure to do so will result in an attitude of marked disinclination to patronize said theatre on the part of the members of this post.”

And the young captain sat down amid applause, during which half a dozen voices seconded the motion.

Stacey was smiling a little at the contrast between the phraseology of the introduction and that of the motion, but, half risen in his seat, he was also looking about him keenly. It did not strike him that the tensity was universal. There were sluggish centres of indifference in the hall, and not many remarks were being made.

Presently he rose to his feet, obtained recognition, and made his way to the front of the room amid some considerable interest.

“I quite agree with Captain Small,” he said, leaning against the chairman’s desk, “that it doesn’t make any difference that Kreisler was an Austrian instead of a German, and that the unit in which he fought never faced an American unit. Aside from that, I disagree with him in everything. It strikes me that for this post to pass any such motion as that proposed would be silly. Kreisler fought against us? Well, what of it? So did a lot of other good men. If we don’t admit that we depreciate our own achievement. Gentlemen, I call to your attention the advice given some months since by a newspaper in Rome. ‘There are a large number of people sitting in a large number of offices, and especially those who never saw service at the front,’ this paper said, ‘who ought to be made to write: The war is over! The war is over! twenty times a day until they get the fact into their heads’.”

There was a murmur of laughter; but Captain Small was on his feet, protesting angrily. “Mr. Commander!” he cried, “I object to the insinuation that Captain Carroll has made—I mean to say, that I never saw active service. If I didn’t it wasn’t my fault, and I—”

The chairman rapped with his gavel. “I am sure Captain Carroll intended no such suggestion,” he observed. “Go on, Captain.”

“Certainly not,” said Stacey coolly. “It was through no fault of Captain Small’s that he did not get to France. He was, I believe, one of the first to volunteer upon America’s entry into the war. But, having made that perfectly clear, and since the point has arisen, I call it to your attention that both the proposer of this motion and those who seconded it happen to be men who, though through no fault of their own, did not see fighting.”

“Wait a minute! Let me finish! I say this not to create dissension, but because I want to show that I’m speaking not just for myself but for the point of view of the men who had the luck—good or bad—to fight the Germans in Flanders and the Argonne.”

He leaned forward and scrutinized the faces of the audience swiftly. There was something compelling in his presence. Undoubtedly he dominated the crowd, even against their will.

“You Franck!” he called sharply. “Are you against letting Kreisler play?”

“I think,” said the commander, when silence had been partly restored, “that it would be unfortunate to divide this organization up into those who saw fighting and those who did not. We should stick together in everything.” But his words were perfunctory. He had been severely wounded at Les Eparges. “All in favor of the motion signify by saying Aye. Opposed, No.”

Stacey had won. But he was under no illusions. He had won by force, and he had made more enemies than friends. When he left the hall at the end of the meeting he was a solitary figure at whom men looked from a distance. He did not care. He preferred his solitude.

But outside, at the foot of the steps, Edwards, the commander, caught up with him and limped off beside him. He was a mechanic and a student, self-educated, and popular with labor. In high quarters he was solemnly suspected of being a socialist.

“What you said was right enough, Carroll,” he observed meditatively. “The trouble was with the way you said it. Too much outside. Too harsh and scornful.”

“Quite true,” Stacey assented. “That happens to be the way I personally am—harsh and scornful.”

Edwards shook his head. “You saw too much of it, I guess, Carroll,” he remarked. “Four whole years, wasn’t it? God in heaven! And more mud than we ever saw. Years more of mud! Filthy thing, the war, wasn’t it?”

Stacey laughed shortly. “Wait twenty years and see how people talk about it,” he said. “Banners waving! Steel-capped heroes! Glory! Glory! We’ll be talking that way, too.”

“Oh, by the way, Edwards,” said Stacey suddenly, “you’re a labor man. I wish to God you’d set me right about that strike business. The thing was too silly the way it got into those rotten papers. I—”

Edwards was laughing quietly. “Pshaw!” he interrupted. “Do you think we don’t know the facts? That’s one thing we do know. The boys aren’t down on you. They’re not even down on Burnham now, though he did turn against them. Can’t say that you’re personally popular—too harsh and scornful, but you’re respected.”

“You ought to crawl through the needle’s eye and come in with us,” Edwards added, after a moment. “I don’t believe you give a damn for your money.”

“You do, though,—you labor people,” Stacey returned coldly. “You’re out for all you can get, regardless. How do you expect me to take sides either for or against you? Greed on one hand, greed on the other. Everywhere.”

“Saw too much of it, Carroll,” Edwards repeated. “Years too much. ’Night. I turn down here.”

CHAPTER VIII

Marian was married at Saint Grace’s early in September, and Stacey was present at the wedding.

A number of people looked at him curiously, for it was known to some that he and the bride had formerly been engaged; but they found nothing in Stacey’s face or bearing to reward them. There was general interest in the wedding, since Ames Price and Marian Latimer were both prominent; there were no excited whispered comments. No gossip linked Stacey’s name with Marian’s. And, indeed, it is an odd fact that it was difficult for a man and still more difficult for a woman to get talked about adversely in Vernon. This was particularly true if they were socially prominent. In that case they must do something almost publicly scandalous, must literally be “asking for it.” Which unfortunately does not signify that morals were any higher in Vernon than elsewhere.

Stacey’s sensations were as mixed as ever. He was able to perceive the smooth elegance of the show, made up of the flowers, the soft light creeping through the stained glass windows of the handsome church, the rustling of costly dresses, the low murmur of fashionable voices, the smiles, the easy greetings, the ushers, and the discreet music of the organ. And he was even able to note that, though Marian was fetching enough to arouse at her appearance on her father’s arm a sudden hum of admiration before silence fell softly, she was not really at her best in that trailing lace-and-satin wedding gown. No, she was more beautiful in a plain tailor-made suit with a short skirt. She would have looked best of all with her fair hair drawn back simply and bound with a ribbon, bare armed, and with a kirtle falling only to her knees. But beneath the surface calm of Stacey’s mind fire smoldered. He was angrily stirred, angrily jealous; for he had not freed himself completely from desire of Marian. Had he, after all, been a fool to renounce her? he wondered. He might have stood there by her side in Ames’s place. But at this he caught himself up scornfully. What? he thought brutally. Deliberately chain himself and her to a life of hopeless incompatibility because he desired to possess this girl’s beautiful body? Was the craving of his whole soul for freedom less passionate than the mere craving of his senses for satisfaction?

Poor Stacey! Contradictory, stormy, inharmonious! Made up of dissonances. Repelled by Marian, yet desiring her; avid of freedom, but avid, too, of hate—an enslaving bond if ever there was one; more passionately and truly in love with beauty than ever before, yet destructive of it in himself; full of power with nowhere to direct it; hard and bitter, yet honestly anguished by the pain in the world.

The ceremony over, he made his way out of the church as quickly as possible, but paused for a moment on the sidewalk to glance at the interminable line of handsome waiting motor cars. The irony in their expensive patronage of one of Christ’s churches made him suddenly smile. Then he set off on foot for the Latimer house, where the reception would be held.

It was very well done, he thought,—adequate, handsome,—er—elegant, without being vulgarly lavish; roses enough, but not “bowers” of roses—though “bowers” was what the paper next morning would say there had been; champagne punch, but not tubs and pools of it; decent air of gaiety, but no riot. Well, you could count on Mr. Latimer to carry the thing off in the right way. It was what he was for. Fifty-odd years of careful training, with never a moment wasted, had fitted him for the task.

Stacey wondered what Mrs. Latimer thought about it all. Oh, she would probably be as detached as always, humorously but not unkindly amused by it. However, he had no chance to find out. Mrs. Latimer was much too busy receiving.

His one real curiosity was to know how Marian would look at him when, in the line, he shook her hand and Ames’s. He decided that she would be candid, simple and virginal, as became a bride, with no hint of anything in her greeting. But he was wrong. He was unfair to Marian, fancying her far more deliberate than she really was. The swift look she gave him was strange and enigmatic, and stirred him. There was a touch of defiance in it, as though she had said: “Well, you would have it this way! Do you like what you’ve done?” And he could not blame her if the words she spoke were merely the proper words. There were people all about.

“Oh, Stacey,” she said, “why couldn’t you be nice and go with me to the wedding? Jimmy’s out of town, so I went all alone. I saw you across the church from me and thought I’d pick you up afterward, but when I came out I couldn’t find you anywhere.”

He smiled at the protective solicitude in her tone. “Oh, well,” he returned, “I’ll drive back with you to your house for a little chat when you’re ready to go.”

No one else had ventured to make any comment to Stacey when Marian’s engagement to Ames Price had been announced; even Mr. Carroll had only looked at his son in an odd puzzled way. But Julie had ventured. She had asserted loyally that Stacey was much too good for Marian, and that Marian didn’t care whom she married so long as he had money. He had reflected at the time that, though Julie simplified things down to bare essentials, it was essentials that she selected. She was not unlike their father in this, he thought. She returned to the subject now, as they glided along the city streets.

“I don’t care!” she broke out hotly. “I think she’s horrid! Of course I know it must have been you who broke off the engagement—now wasn’t it, Stacey? Why won’t you admit it? Why, anybody would be proud to marry you!—but then for her to go and marry a stupid person like Ames Price, old enough to be her father, too, less than three months later,—why, I think it’s cheap! That’s what Marian is—cheap!”

Stacey laughed, amused at her desire to comfort him. He enjoyed being with his sister; nor was there anything patronizing in his feeling for her. He was not doing so admirably with a complex mind that he could afford to look comfortably down upon Julie for having a simple mind. And she was not stupid. He thought she did rather well with life.

“Oh,” he observed, “Ames isn’t as old as all that! He’s only forty or thereabouts. I’m almost thirty-five.”

“Here! Take care!” Stacey interrupted, stretching out his hand toward the lever, as the car barely grazed by a heavily laden motor-van. “Julie, you’re a public menace!”

Stacey laughed again, this time at Julie’s imperturbable calm. “Everything’s all right, old girl,” he said, “and you needn’t try to apply balm to my bruised heart, though it’s nice of you to want to.”

And they got out, having reached the Prouts’ handsome brick residence, the plans for which Stacey had drawn.

But the maid who opened the door for them followed them into the living-room. “Mis’ Prout,” she announced tragically, “Annie’s going to leave!”

“Is she?” said Julie, drawing off her gloves. “Well, that’s a nuisance. Excuse me a minute, Stacey dear, while I telephone. Go mix yourself a high-ball. You’ll find everything on the sideboard in the dining-room.” And she sat down at a small mahogany desk and opened a tiny cupboard that concealed a telephone.

Stacey obeyed and presently returned with his glass to the living-room, where he listened to his sister call up two employment agencies to make application for a cook, and telephone an advertisement to two newspapers.

“You really are a wonder, Jule!” he said, when she had closed the desk. “Calm and efficient as they make ’em.”

“Oh,” she returned, opening her eyes wide in surprise, “that’s nothing! It happens so often that I should be a silly if I were upset by it now. Perhaps you noticed that I didn’t even have to look the telephone numbers up in the book. Now we can talk.”

But just at this moment the maid returned to announce the visit of a Miss Loeffler, who followed close upon the maid’s heels.

“Hello, Irene,” said Julie pleasantly. “Glad you dropped in. You don’t know my brother, Stacey, do you?”

Miss Loeffler gave Stacey a nod and a brief firm shake of the hand, then threw herself down on the davenport, crossed her legs, and swung the right one vigorously. She looked about twenty-four years old, had dark bobbed hair, a small pretty face with restless dark eyes and a petulant mouth, and wore a brown street suit with a very short skirt.

“Of course I don’t approve of you, Captain Carroll,” she said crisply, “because you are Captain Carroll, a tool of militarism in the late capitalistic war. No, I’m glad to meet you, but I don’t approve of you.”

“Oh, well,” said Stacey, “even pity from you’s more dear than that from another.”

“Naturally, if you quoted any one at me, it would have to be some one hopelessly old-fashioned, like Shelley. Can I have a high-ball, Julie?” she asked, jumping up. All her movements were abrupt, like her voice.

“Of course,” said Julie. “Oh, no, Stacey, don’t try to get it for her. Irene will be cross if you do.”

Nevertheless, he followed Miss Loeffler into the dining-room and at least stood by while she mixed her high-ball.

Suddenly, in the midst of the operation, she turned to him and gazed into his eyes. “What are you really like, Mr. Carroll?” she demanded intensely.

“Awfully orderly,” he replied, reaching out to restrain her hand that held the silver water-bottle. “Can’t bear to see things spilled.”

“See you’ve both been to the wedding,” remarked Miss Loeffler. “You look it. Have a lingering odor of ceremony about you. All very smooth and elegant, I suppose?” And she lighted a cigarette.

Julie was crocheting. “No, Irene,” she said, “you needn’t go around pretending to despise weddings and then come here and try to worm a description of this one out of me. If you wanted to know what it was like you ought to have gone to it and seen for yourself.”

Stacey laughed, as much at his sister’s keenness as at her guest’s eccentricity. But Miss Loeffler was vexed.

“I don’t pretend!” she asserted hotly. “I do dislike weddings. And if I ever want to go and live with a man I shall, without making a silly fuss about it, and then when either he or I get bored we’ll simply break off.”

Julie sighed. “I’m afraid you’ll find it a very nervous wearing life,” she remarked calmly. “I shouldn’t care for it myself, but then I’m—”

“Oh, perfectly hopeless, Julie! You belong back in the eighteen-eighties. What do you think about it, Mr. Carroll?”

“About marriage?” Stacey asked. “Nothing at all. Doesn’t interest me. But I should say you people were at least as Victorian as Julie. You’re quite as excited about the necessity of not having a ceremony as old-fashioned people are about having one.”

Miss Loeffler insisted angrily that this was not true, but presently grew calmer.

“Anyway, you’re right about one thing,” she said, finishing her high-ball, then setting the glass down on the floor and dropping her cigarette end into it. “The whole question’s overstressed. We’ve got other bigger things to think about. Well, I must go. Just dropped in for a minute. See you again soon, Julie. You going, Mr. Carroll? Give you a lift if you are.”

“Thanks,” said Stacey, getting up. He found the girl physically attractive, and he was glad of anything that would keep his thoughts from Marian. He followed her to her handsome run-about, and they set off swiftly.

“No. When we have Soviets in America I suppose such cars as remain will all be in the service of the public. Of course they may put me to driving one, but more likely I’ll have to cobble shoes or something.”

“And a very good thing, too,” said Stacey. “Pleasant occupation, nice leathery smell, and lots of time to reflect on universal subjects.”

She frowned. “You don’t believe in me at all, do you?” she demanded, looking at him petulantly. “You think we’re all—”

But in her excitement she had pressed her foot on the accelerator instead of the brake, so that they dashed past a policeman who had raised his hand to stop them, swerved madly around the front of a trolley-car that was approaching on the cross street, sent pedestrians flying to left and right, and returned to a normal speed only a hundred yards farther along the avenue, fortunately not crowded, that they were following.

Stacey sighed. “There’s not a pin to choose between you and Julie,” he remarked patiently. “You both try to kill me the same afternoon.”

Miss Loeffler laughed girlishly. “That was stupid of me,” she admitted. “And you were quite the calmest thing I’ve ever seen. But truly,” she went on earnestly, keeping the car, however, at a discreet twelve miles an hour, “it’s serious. You’d be surprised to know how much is stirring deep, deep down right here in Vernon, that you’d think was a positive stronghold of capitalism. Come with me now, will you?” she said eagerly, “and let me show you?”

“People who are really thinking, people who get together and see things straight—the social revolution, Bolshevism.”

“Dear me!” said Stacey. “I knew Vernon was no longer provincial, but I had no idea it was so metropolitan as all that.”

“Oh, you can laugh!” she returned darkly, “but you’ll see. Of course you understand we trust your discretion.”

She turned off from the avenue and stopped the car before an office building. “We meet here,” she announced, “in an ordinary office-room, because it’s so conspicuous that it’s perfectly safe.” And they went up in the elevator.

The large room which they presently entered had been given the semblance of a club. There were numerous easy chairs around the floor, chintz curtains at the windows, and across one end of the room a huge oak table with a vase of flowers and many books and periodicals. Fifteen or twenty people were in the room, some standing, some sprawling in the chairs, two or three perched on the edge of the table. The air was heavy with cigarette smoke.

“Well, he isn’t exactly a comrade,” said Irene. “I just brought him along because he’s so aggravating and skeptical. But he’s perfectly safe. Stacey Carroll, comrades.” And with a proprietary air she drew him over to one end of the room. He rather liked Miss Loeffler. There was something so girlish beneath her pose.

Stacey looked about him idly. All but five of the persons in the room were women. He knew a few of them by sight, and the faces of others were vaguely familiar to him; but he had been away from Vernon for so long and so utterly cut off from it mentally that it was hard for him to remember old acquaintances. Doubtless he had met nearly all these people formerly—he didn’t know. Anyway, they were of a younger generation than he—in the twenties, most of them. He observed that the majority of the women wore their hair bobbed.

“I suppose you might call it that,” she replied, sitting on the arm of his leather chair. “If you were unlucky enough to be a woman you’d appreciate the advantages of wearing your hair short.”

“It’s rather becoming to you,” he observed. “Can’t say I think it is to all of them.”

“It’s stupid and old-fashioned to pay compliments,” she returned coldly. “They don’t interest me at all.”

“Sorry,” said Stacey, “but it’s difficult not to, with all this air of freedom about, and you sitting so close to me.”

She jumped up angrily, but then after a moment defiantly resumed her seat on the arm of his chair.

One of the young men, Comrade Leslie Vane, approached them. He wore a flowing black tie beneath a very low soft collar. Stacey knew him. He was a poet—published things occasionally in the “Pagan” and the “Touchstone”—and the son of John Vane, the big flour man. People in Vernon were very nice about it, but naturally at heart they felt sorry for Mr. Vane, Senior, who was extremely well liked, and rejoiced that at any rate his other son, John, Junior, was normal. Stacey was rather inclined to share Vernon’s point of view in this.

“Hello, Stacey,” said Vane languidly. “Glad to see a militarist with an open mind, anyhow. First example I’ve met with.”

Stacey reflected, as he acknowledged the greeting, that when the Middle-West turned esthetic it became mournfully old-fashioned. Positively Leslie Vane was going back all of twenty-five years in search of a style.

“Sure!” he said. “I’m open to conviction, but what do you want to convince me of?”

“Oh,” drawled Vane, “the papers have all been read; you’re late. There’s only just general talk going on now, but it may do you some good if you’ll listen.”

A little group had gathered around them, and the smoky air became full of words, among which “Soviets,” “proletariat,” and “Bolshevism” predominated.

Stacey, too bored to listen, fell to wondering for a moment about real Bolshevism. He shook his head. No use, that either. He didn’t care if change did come. In a way he would be furiously delighted if order was upset,—things were so silly. But he didn’t believe in any millennium or even in improvement through change. What had the war accomplished?

“—and so that, most of all,” some woman was saying, “is the true lesson of Holy Russia. What do you think of it, Mr. Carroll? I won’t call you Captain.”

He started. “Of Bolshevism? The—er—coming social revolution. Oh, you’ll all be raped, then cut in little pieces, and Comrade Leslie will have his throat cut. Not because Bolshevism is so especially worse than anything else, but because that’s what always happens when any kind of violence gets loose. And, do you know? I don’t care a damn whether it comes or not!”

He meant what he said, as much as he meant anything at all in respect to these futile idiots, but, since there was no passion in his words and his face remained expressionless, his remarks were delightedly deemed a skilful evasion of the question (“My dear, how could he say what he really thought—he a captain and a Carroll?”) and an amusing pleasantry. His bold use of the word “rape,” too, was much appreciated.

But such comments were made after his departure. For neither Miss Loeffler’s physical attractiveness nor conversation with the fashionable followers of Lenin could any longer distract his mind from Marian. She and Ames would be sitting close together now in the drawing-room of a Pullman car. . . .

However, he felt an amused curiosity to know what his sister’s attitude had been toward her impetuous visitor, so he called Julie up on the telephone.

“What do you think about that wild creature that broke in on us to-day?” he asked.

“Irene?” said Julie’s calm voice. “Oh, she’s just a goose, but she’s really quite nice and sweet and young at heart.”

“Yes, that’s what I thought,” he assented. “Occurred to me, though, that I’d better call you up and let you know that she hadn’t eloped with me or done me any real harm—though she nearly ran us into a street-car. Quite a good time.”

“Now, Stacey, listen!” said Julie anxiously. “You won’t go and fall in love with Irene, will you?”

He laughed. “I won’t do anything without asking you about it first, Jule. I lean on you, you know.”

CHAPTER IX

One morning some three weeks later Stacey received a night letter from Omaha. It was addressed “Honorable Stacey Carroll” and read:

“My husband Jim is awfully sick with flu and I am afraid he is going to die. He keeps asking for you though he is out of his head and does not know what he says. Please, Captain Carroll, come if you can because then he might get well. Gertrude Burnham.”

Stacey wasted no time. He sent a telegram to say that he was starting immediately, telephoned for a lower berth on the evening train, and pulled a suitcase from a closet. But in the midst of his neat methodical packing he suddenly paused and gazed abstractedly away. It had occurred to him that perhaps if Burnham could see him as he had been in France the sick man might be more likely to recognize him and might even—who could tell?—draw a little strength from the old revived relationship of command and protectiveness. Stacey took out the things he had already packed, chose a larger bag, and put in his uniform at the bottom.

He arrived in Omaha early the next morning, drove to a hotel, unpacked his bag, put on his uniform, and took a taxi to Burnham’s address.

The taxi stopped in front of a small dilapidated wooden house in a shabby quarter surprisingly near the centre of town. Stacey descended and paid the chauffeur.

But before he had time to reach the door of the house it opened and a woman hurried out to meet him. She was thin, haggard, dishevelled, though not slovenly, with a worn face and worn eyes about which strayed limp locks of black hair, but there were faded traces of fineness in her. Stacey remembered that Burnham had always spoken of his wife with pride. She had, he often said, had a high-school education.

“Oh, Captain Carroll,” she cried, “it’s awful good of you to come, sir! I knew I oughtn’t to’ve asked you, but I didn’t know what to do!”

“And you wore your uniform, too,” she added, with a pale half-smile. “That was just right. I wouldn’t have thought you’d have thought of that.”

They entered the house, in which the Burnhams occupied one-half of the second floor. Three small children, shabby and not very clean, with frightened faces, were waiting for them just inside, and stared at Stacey.

“I keep them looking better than this, Captain Carroll, when everything’s all right,” Mrs. Burnham explained apologetically, and they all climbed the stairs in silence.

As they went, Stacey reflected swiftly on a number of things,—that what life did to Burnham was very like what it did to Phil, and that a lot of criminal rubbish was being talked about the prosperous workingman. Why, thought Stacey, even his father, who was a kindly man, declared bitterly that workmen were buying silk shirts to-day and denounced them as profiteers! Well, suppose a man did earn six dollars a day for manual labor, suppose he even earned it regularly for six days in every week (which he didn’t), how much was that a year? Let’s see. Eighteen hundred and some dollars, on which, with the price of everything gone wild, he was supposed to raise a family and live in luxury. What rot! Stacey himself, who lived at home, had a car that his father had given him, and cared little for luxuries, felt pinched with two hundred dollars a month. Oh, damn money!

They reached the top of the stairs and paused before a door through which came a strange murmuring voice.

“Jim won’t know you, sir,—not now,” said Mrs. Burnham, “but if you’d be willing just to sit there a while, maybe—”

“Yes, sir. At least, I guess he’s good. They don’t any of them seem much help. He’ll be here at ten o’clock.”

They went in, Stacey and Mrs. Burnham; the children were left outside the door. Burnham, flushed with fever, lay tossing and muttering on a narrow bed. Stacey looked down at him and lifted his hot hand, but there was no recognition in the man’s eyes.

“I’ll sit here,” said Stacey after a moment, drawing up a chair beside the bed.

The woman silently took another chair, and they remained so for an hour and a half, neither of them speaking, she rising at regular intervals to press a spoonful of medicine between her husband’s teeth, until the doctor arrived.

He was brusque, had keen eyes, and appeared competent. Stacey drew him aside at the conclusion of the visit.

“Yes,” said the doctor, “fifty-fifty. He’s as likely to recover as not. Splendid physique! There’s nothing much I can do except to give stimulants in case of sudden collapse. We don’t know anything about flu really, you know, and this pneumonia that follows on flu. I’ve seen hundreds die of it—I was in France, too,—and hundreds get well,—both without any reason. Served under you?”

The conversation had taken place in the hallway outside the door. When Stacey reëntered the sick room Mrs. Burnham gazed at him wistfully.

“It’s all right,” he said. “Jim’s got a good chance. The doctor’s going to send a nurse.”

Her eyes filled with tears, and she opened her mouth as though to speak, but closed it again, with only a strangled: “Thanks,” and turned her head away. After a time she got up.

“I’ll go down and cook some dinner,” she said. “You’ll excuse me, sir, if it isn’t much, won’t you? I haven’t had time to—”

“No,” he broke in, “you’re too tired to cook. Please go out and get some lunch for yourself and the children if you know of some delicatessen place,—and for me, too.” And he drew out his purse.

But at this her face colored. “No sir,” she said, with just a hint of resentment, “I couldn’t.”

He thrust a five-dollar bill upon her. “Do as I tell you,” he said imperiously. “This is no time for silly pride. Go on, and mind you get good things and plenty of them.”

She cowered beneath his sternness and went meekly. And Stacey reflected grimly that pride was a decorative handsome emotion that flourished ornamentally, a highly esteemed orchid, in luxury. It couldn’t grow well in poverty, came up sickly and scrawny,—the soil was too weak.

Half an hour later he heard her climb the stairs again and move quietly about the next room. Presently she returned to the bedroom.

“Will you go in there now, sir?” she said. “Everything’s ready for you. Here’s your change—two dollars and sixty-four cents.”

He wanted to insist on her eating first, but thought best not to try, so he went, without comment, through the door she indicated into another bedroom—the only other, he supposed,—that obviously also served as dining-room and parlor. Dishes were disposed neatly on a table, with sandwiches, Bologna sausage, eggs, coffee, and doughnuts.

He sat down, then looked up, listening, with a smile, and suddenly rose, crossed the room, and flung open another door. The kitchenette. And there, as he had thought, were the three children, sitting, very terrified at his discovery of them, close together on a small bench.

“Hello,” he said, “you’re out here, are you? Well, come on! Let’s eat together. Only I think we’d better do it in this room or your mother will hear us.”

“She said we was to wait and not make a noise,” observed the oldest girl in a small voice.

“Well, we won’t wait,” Stacey remarked. “There are doughnuts, you know. You come on in with me,” he said to the girl who had spoken, “on your tip-toes, and help fix the plates.”

“First we’ll fix one for your mother,” he whispered, and she nodded, her lips pressed together.

He and the three children ate gravely in the kitchenette. Then Stacey rose. “I’ll go back to your father now,” he said, “and send your mother out.”

“Your plate is ready for you, Mrs. Burnham. And the children have eaten,” he announced in a triumphant whisper.

She gasped, then suddenly her mouth curved prettily into a smile—the first he had seen her give. Stacey sat down again by the bedside.

Burnham seemed a little calmer now, and his incoherent muttering had ceased, but he looked very exhausted, and Stacey was relieved when about one o’clock the nurse arrived.

The three of them sat there silently all the hot afternoon, with only short intervals of release when Stacey stretched his legs in the hall or Mrs. Burnham went out to keep an eye on the children. There was no change in the sick man. The nurse said that the crisis would probably be reached next day.

At six o’clock Stacey left the house, asking the nurse to telephone him in case of a serious change. He walked back to his hotel.

He was abstracted, an isolated personality, growing more isolated with every month that passed in his life; so that now he saw little of his surroundings and glanced but carelessly both at the depressing quarter from which he had set out and at the prosperous business section he presently entered. He merely thought, idly, that the city seemed a characterless place, like all other middle-western cities. And the imposing court-house, of white marble, that he passed shortly before reaching his hotel, did not impress him. It did, indeed, occur to him once that there was a certain tensity in the air, like that which characterizes a city in boom times, but the observation, purely involuntary, did not particularly interest him. It interested him not at all when later, glancing through the front page of a local paper, he learned the cause of the tensity—trouble with the negroes, “Another Dastardly Assault!”

Early the next morning he was back at Burnham’s house. The man seemed worse, Stacey thought with a touch of real sadness,—more feverish, more restless. There was no capacity for smiling, even faintly, left in Mrs. Burnham. The nurse, cool, professional, would express no opinion; and the doctor, too, when he came, was noncommittal.

“Before to-night there ought to be a decision one way or the other,” he said to Stacey. “I’ll come again at four. Call me up earlier if necessary.”

There was nothing to do but wait, and Stacey again settled himself in a chair near the foot of the bed.

The crisis came early in the afternoon. Burnham tossed and kicked furiously, and his incoherent muttering grew louder. Suddenly he raised himself on the palms of his hands into a half-sitting posture and stared directly at Stacey—or not really at him, through him.

“By God, Captain!” he cried wildly, in a high unnatural voice, “you’ve got nerve! Might’ve been shot . . . shot . . . shot! What hell you care? You wouldn’t do it!” He panted. “Not you, Captain! Said I’d follow you to hell. Nerve . . . nerve . . . nerve. . . .” His voice trailed away to silence, while the nurse leaned over him, pressing his shoulders down firmly.

Stacey had started at the words. They were spoken, he knew, in delirium, not to him but to a shadow vanished eleven months since, but Stacey understood them. Burnham knew, then, did he, about that Argonne attack? Good! Probably no other kind of approbation from any source would have touched Stacey, even faintly. This, for an instant, made him thrill with a fierce proud happiness. The next moment there was nothing left in his consciousness but concern for his friend.

But Burnham lay quiet now, his color less vivid, his breath coming and going easily, and the nurse looked at Stacey and Mrs. Burnham with a smile.

Stacey wiped his forehead, and Mrs. Burnham, collapsing into a chair, laid her head on a table and wept softly.

“Fine!” said the doctor, when he came. “He’ll get well now. Just a question of time.”

The next morning, when Mrs. Burnham opened the door to Stacey, he observed that she was wearing a clean dress and had done her hair quite prettily.

She flushed. “Yes,” she said. “He slept right through the night. Only woke up once for just a minute, then went back to sleep again. Oh, I’m so glad, Captain Carroll!” Her eyes filled. “And so grateful to you, sir!”

Late in the morning Burnham opened his eyes slowly and let them wander curiously about the room. They rested on Stacey, and a puzzled expression came into them, then, after a moment, recognition, and the man tried to raise his hand in salute.

“Where’s the devil, sir?” he asked, in a thin voice. Then he smiled. “Funny!” he said. “I thought I was in hell.” And he began to laugh weakly.

“Oh, all right, Captain, all right!” Burnham returned, still laughing, and went to sleep again at once.

Stacey was rather tired in the evenings now from sitting so monotonously still all day. He resented the excitement that he felt throbbing in the streets and the nervous buzz of the groups through which he had to elbow his way in the hotel lobby. His one recreation consisted in changing to civilian clothes for dinner; for he always wore his uniform when he went to the Burnhams’. It happened that the regiment in which he had commanded a battalion had been recruited from this part of the country, so that there were perhaps twenty-five of his men living right here in Omaha, among them a first lieutenant whom he had sincerely liked. And, ignorant though he was and knew himself to be of these men’s real personalities, he was bound to each of them—worst as well as best—by a closer bond than that which held him to Philip Blair or to Marian or to Mrs. Latimer. He would have given lavishly of his money or his time—nonsense! of something real! his freedom or his strength!—to any of these men who needed it; and not in the least from a sense of duty,—inevitably, as a matter of course. Yet he had no companionable desire to see them. He made no attempt to look them up. He spent his evenings in bed, reading “War and Peace,” which in former days he had not cared for but now found singularly satisfying—more satisfying than any book by his old idol, Dostoieffsky.

Burnham’s recovery was extraordinary. On the third day after the crisis the doctor refused jovially to waste more time in visiting him—the nurse had been dismissed the day before—and told him to eat, talk and do as he pleased, short of getting up.

“I think,” observed Stacey that afternoon, “that I’ll pull out to-night on the midnight. You’re as fit as ever, Burnham.”

He was, indeed, restless and anxious to go. Here, sitting near Burnham, chatting casually of trivial things, he was strangely at peace; but an increasing turmoil that he felt in the city each evening exasperated him.

The man looked at him wistfully, then across at his wife. “Gerty,” he said, “you go out with the kids for a little while, will you? I got to talk to the Captain.”

“Now you’ve done it!” said Stacey cheerfully. “Fat lot of popularity I’ll have with Gertrude from now on!”

Burnham laughed. “Funny thing, ain’t it, Captain?” he observed. “They can’t seem to get onto it at all, women can’t. They go and get jealous, like Gerty now.”

“Uh-huh, I guess that’s the word. It ain’t got a thing to do with them.” He paused. “Maybe that’s why they don’t like it,” he concluded.

“Philosopher!” said Stacey. “Analyzing the female heart. You’ll be writing for the magazines next.”

“Sure!” Burnham grinned, then frowned. “All the same, I don’t get onto it very well myself,” he continued. “Now you’d think that I ought to be feeling all upset with gratitude to you, the way Gerty is, and worried about you wasting so much of your time and money. Well, I don’t feel that way at all. Damned if I do! I just feel friendly and pleasant and—natural-like. And of course some day I’m going to pay you back the money you spent on the nurse ’n’ doctor, but it don’t seem important, somehow, like it does to Gerty. If it was something you cared about, Captain, I’d get up now, the way I am, and work all day to get it for you, but Christ! you don’t care a damn for money!”

“Oh, shut up, Burnham!” said Stacey, laughing. “How you do run on!” Nevertheless, the man’s words were pleasant to him, and reënforced his own strangely peaceful mood.

“Seems sort of noisy out-doors to-day,” Burnham remarked suddenly. “What’s the row, I wonder?”

And, indeed, through the window a dull and sullen murmur, that was like a deep note held steadily in an organ, did enter and penetrate the room.

Burnham lay silent for a long time. Then he turned his eyes slowly to Stacey. And in them and in his voice when he spoke again was apparent a timidity which his huge bulk and rough unshaven face made somehow touching.

“Captain,” he said hesitantly, “there was something I wanted to say to you, only I don’t know if I’ve got the nerve. We boys was always kind of scared of you, you know,—oh, not because you was a captain!—fat lot of respect we had for captains as captains!—but just because—oh, I dunno! And it’s kind of hard to say anything to you that’s kind of personal, as you might say. All the same, I’ll take a chance.” He rushed on with his words to get it over. “What I want to say is that some of us know all about that attack that—didn’t come off.” He paused apprehensively, but with a sigh of relief.

However, Stacey was as friendly as before. “Yes,” he said quietly, “I know you do. You let that out Wednesday in a lot of wild talk you were spouting.”

“Well, what do you know about that?” Burnham exclaimed. “And me who wouldn’t have told even Gerty! Did any one—”

“No, no, it’s all right! No one else understood. And I’m glad you know.”

“ ’N’ that’s why I said what I did about going with you to hell or anywhere else. I ain’t the only one, Captain. There’s Morgan and Jones and Petitvalle and Isaacs and all the rest of C Company that knows, who’d fight to go along, too. Oh, it would be a nice little family party!” And Burnham laughed gaily.

Well, Stacey had said to Phil months ago that this was the one exploit of which he was proud, but he had said so haughtily, with his heart full of bitterness. Just now his heart was calm, as though cleansed. He was almost happy. Yet he could hardly have accounted for his state of mind, even had he cared to try. It was not, certainly, that his vanity was flattered. Perhaps it was, in part, that when Stacey had related the episode to Philip Blair his defiance of the machine was first in his thoughts, while now the stress was on the human results of that defiance. Perhaps Burnham’s simple assertion of loyalty released Stacey from his obsessing perception of greed, greed everywhere.

“What in hell is going on?” Burnham exclaimed. “Tell me, Captain! You know all right.”

“Well,” said Stacey doubtfully, but thinking it on the whole better not to have the invalid aggravated by unsatisfied curiosity, “there’s been a lot of race trouble here lately. Just now it seems to be mostly about some negro—name of Brown—said to have assaulted a woman. He’s shut up in the court-house jail, I believe. Sounds as though some sort of demonstration—”

But at this moment a scattered crackling sound broke out in the distance. Burnham sat up quickly, and Stacey crossed to the window and looked out.

“Some sort of demonstration?” said Burnham. “Some sort of riot! That’s shooting.”

Mrs. Burnham entered the room hurriedly, but, though frightened, she had not forgotten her grievance. “I suppose I can come in now,” she said, “since there’s a war or something going on.”

Darkness fell while they sat there together, Mrs. Burnham soon ashamed of her pettishness and trying to think up little things she could do for Stacey, Burnham stretching his arms and legs to feel their returning strength, all three chatting about the most casual matters. A lamp sputtered alight in the street and shone in upon them.

Oddly, Stacey thought of that afternoon with Phil and Catherine in New York five years ago. He had the same sense of calm now as then.

But this sea of sound that roared dully in the distance, at times swelling for a moment so that Mrs. Burnham turned her eyes apprehensively to Stacey,—it had been absent then. Had it, though? What else was the war? Stacey thought fancifully.

Mrs. Burnham tried stammeringly to express her gratitude, but Burnham only gripped Stacey’s hand and smiled.

“May I say good-bye to the children?” asked Stacey, and Mrs. Burnham, too, smiled at this and went in search of them.

“Now look here, Captain!” said her husband anxiously in a low voice as soon as she had left the room, “you won’t get mixed up in that mess in the streets, will you?”

Stacey shook his head. “No, no, I’ll be all right,” he replied reassuringly.

CHAPTER X

Stacey glanced up and down the street, but it lay quiet and empty in the brightness of its regularly spaced arc-lights. The noise came from the direction of the centre of town, and as this was also the direction of his hotel he sighed and set off toward it. He sighed because he felt himself stepping back into the old shadow from the rare brightness of his recent mood. It occurred to him that life was like that, some one had said,—a handful of peaceful islands scattered stingily over a tumultuous sea. Which figure reveals how little he knew himself—what he was and what he wanted. For at heart he did not crave repose.

He turned a corner, the rumble of sound became a roar, and he was on the edge of the crowd. Some distance down the street into which he had emerged, on the left at its intersection by another wider thoroughfare, he could make out a corner of the white marble court-house that had left him unimpressed. And one side of this building—the east, it must be—stretched along flush with the street that Stacey followed. But all about and obscuring such part of the structure as lay within his vision there was now a black howling throng, while, over all, smoke hung. And even here, where Stacey stood, the crowd was dense. Traffic had ceased. Motor cars stood motionless. Men had scrambled up the sides of them and clung there, all staring in one direction; and from the windows of the houses flanking the street more people leaned and gazed.

Here the crowd was not yet a mass—groups only; but as Stacey went forward toward the court-house, which was perhaps an eighth of a mile away, it thickened, so that to traverse it became increasingly difficult. And as it thickened its temper grew manifestly warmer. A confusion of cries agitated it. Sometimes they burst into a refrain—“Nigger! Nigger! We want that nigger!” Arms were thrown up, gesticulating wildly. And there were little centres of local interest—a man suddenly hauling himself up to the shoulders of another for a view and thrown down again fiercely, snarling contests over invaded personal rights, animal-like squeals of women at the crushing pressure upon them. The sweating faces had a bestial look beneath the arc-lights, and a sourish human odor tainted the warm air. Noise! Noise!

Stacey was not feeling anger—only a deep disgust, disgust of crowds, sick disgust of all humanity. His emotion was the more acute for its contrast with the mood he had felt in Burnham’s house. He was like a man who has made a longer jump by taking a running start. So this was the kind of thing on which perpetual peace and leagues of nations were to be founded, was it? he thought coldly. He would have gone back out of its contamination, having certainly no desire to witness the spectacle it clamored for, save that he had some desperate idea of perhaps being able to assist the few who must somewhere be standing off the multitude. So he fought his way forward, inch by inch, helped perhaps a very little by the fact that he was in uniform, using his shoulders and elbows mercilessly in cold contempt of his victims, shrieked at, cursed at, struck at even, but making progress, until at last he came, panting, to the corner of his own street and that other wider avenue. He could get no farther, either ahead or to the left. The crowd was a solid wall. And to return was equally impossible. He could only stay where he was and hope that something might happen, some movement in the mob, that would make it possible for him to push through suddenly and reach the court-house.

He stood on tip-toe and looked about him. He was almost at the corner, close to the right hand edge of the street, and he perceived that here the latter was flanked by the side wall of what he took to be a theatre. In the wall, some two or three feet above the ground, were embrasures, vantage points held with difficulty by tightly wedged groups. As Stacey looked, a sudden backward surge of the crowd swept down and away two such members of one group, and Stacey, diving desperately in, himself struggled up to the place and held it against all contestants.

All events were submerged beneath a roar of voices, a sea of noise that broke in echoing waves against the sides of the buildings. It was an emotion in itself, irrespective of its cause. It hypnotized the crowd, produced a singular wild stare in men’s eyes, made their movements jerky, their own involuntary addition to the noise raucous. It did not hypnotize Stacey, because he was aloof, remote, and also because he was too familiar with noise. Yet, he, too, had undergone its terrible spell—early in the war, before he had grown hard enough to bear the unbearable. He knew bitterly well what Siegfried Sassoon meant by: “I’m going stark, staring mad because of the guns.”

Stacey threw one last contemptuous glance at the mob beneath him, then gazed off over their heads at the court-house.

The first thing he noted was that it was on fire, smoke creeping dully from its ground-floor windows; the second, that fighting was going on inside it, since the south door, that opening on the wide cross-street, was shattered, while through it rushed in or were driven back mad struggling clusters of men.

“Good for the police!” thought Stacey. “Oh, by God! I wish I were there!”

Two firemen appeared at a third-floor window, and from the nozzle of the hose they held a stream shot down upon the crowd. There was a wild surging movement that swept to the crowd even here, pushing it back upon itself tumultuously. Snarls of anger rose. There were struggles, shrieks, fists striking out, mad efforts of individuals to keep from being crushed. And up ahead on the left the lighted air was shadowed by the bricks and stones hurled through it against the court-house. The court-house windows shattered in fragments. Stacey could not hear them crash—the noise of voices submerged all other sounds, as it was submerging thought—but he could see the jagged black gaps appear and the shining rain of glass. He held his place in the embrasure with difficulty, clinging to an iron ring in the wall and to his nearest companion.

Then suddenly a vast exultant roar shook the crowd. The stream of water had ceased.

The crowd was wilder now, frenzied. Stacey, looking down, saw faces convulsed, venomous, filthy with ugliness. He felt a shudder of loathing and recollected with passionate assent what Anatole France had called life—“a sickness, a leprosy, a mold on the face of the earth.”

Time passed. Stacey, knowing mobs, thought that perhaps eventually this one would wear itself out on its own emotion, begin to break up into individuals sick with fatigue, and little by little disperse. But he soon perceived that it had too varied a spectacle to witness, an immense vicious vaudeville, something new every few minutes,—a ladder thrown against the court-house wall, half scaled by eight or ten youths, pushed slowly back by the defenders, and crashing over at last to earth, the scalers leaping off wildly as it fell; a rush through the door; fighting; shots.

Even so, the mob had sullen moments when its roar sank to a rumble, but again it occurred to Stacey that it was being lashed up afresh by leaders. There was a young man on a white horse there in the street before the besieged building. Twice he wheeled his horse about and harangued the crowd. His voice was inaudible here, but the emotion he created immediately around him swept on, like something tangible, beyond the reach of his words, and his gestures stirred men to renewed frenzy. Also it struck Stacey that, while here at the corner the crowd was jammed beyond hope of penetration, there on the left, just before the south side of the court-house, where the fight was sharpest, was room to move. There were rushes, assaults. The fighting part of the mob was relatively small. Oh, they all wanted the negro, damn them! They wanted blood and torture. But as spectators. If only he could get there!

And at this thought, that there were deliberate leaders, anger began to rise in Stacey, who till now had felt only disgust and scorn.

But a sudden whirling streamer of red light curved into a broken window of the court-house and a dull explosion made the air throb. A red glare flamed up inside the building, and a great “Ah-h-h!” came from the crowd.

“By God! look at it!”—“A bomb! Oh, Christ! a bomb!”—“Oh, look at her burn!”—“Nigger, we’ll get him now!”—“Oh, nigger!”—“A-e-e-e!” Shouts, leaps, struggles, madness.

The crowd could afford to wait now, thought Stacey, looking on grimly, as black smoke poured from windows and rose in clouds, begriming the marble walls.

It was late. How long had he been here in this filth? Two hours? Three? Stacey looked at his watch. Ten-thirty. He gazed back wearily down the street, in a sullen despair beneath which anger smoldered. An outrage to be born into such a world! And he could not take refuge in himself. He hated himself as he hated this mob. Oh, he did not, of course, feel with them now! What was a black man’s life or a white man’s—any man’s—his own—Philip Blair’s, even—to deserve such clamor? He was hard, crusted over with bitterness. But there had been times in France when . . .

A sudden frenzied shriek from the mob made him start and turn his eyes back to the court-house. On the steps at its entrance, that opening on the street which Stacey had followed, alone in the lurid smoky light stood a man—rather stout, not tall, but impressive in his solitude.

“The mayor!”—“It’s the mayor!”—“Smith!”—“Mayor!” came in a shattered volley of cries from all about.

Then in one fierce burst of sound: “Nigger! Give us that nigger! Nigger! Nigger!”

And, after this, dwindling sound, save from the storm centre at the south entrance where the news could not be known; finally a semblance of silence. Stacey could not hear the man’s voice when he spoke—“I can’t do that, boys!” he learned later the words had been—but he could see him shake his head and could see the firm negative gesture he made with both extended hands.

An immense insane howl of anger burst out. A crowd surged up the east steps, and the solitary figure disappeared among them, dragged down in a chaotic black mass of assailants.

A thrill of exultation and anger ran through Stacey. By God! he’d stood them off! One living man with a soul of his own against the mob! And he was to be dragged down like that? killed for it? Beside himself, Stacey leaped to the ground and fought madly to break through to the one man on the scene. Impossible! Far from pushing forward, he was caught in a sudden retreating surge of the throng and swept back, back, raging, down the street, to the edge of a narrow roofed-in alley that led out of it behind the theatre building. Here he held his own once more.

Mad cries of wrath against the mayor came from all about him. “Nigger lover!”—“Get the nigger lover!”—“Lynch him!”

Close to Stacey a heavy red-faced man was shaking his clenched fists high in the air. “Oh, lynch him! The God-damn son of a bitch! Oh, nigger lover! Oh, kill him! Lynch him!” he shrieked, his voice hoarse, his face purple, convulsed, incredibly bestial.

And suddenly a white ungovernable rage flared up in Stacey. There was nothing left of his personality but rage. He seized the man about the waist, and, helped by a new surge of the crowd, half flung him, half was swept with him, back into the narrow dark entrance of the alley and down it.

The momentum gathered from the crowd hurled both forward, staggering, and separated them. But Stacey was upon his man again instantly. They were perhaps thirty yards down the alley in a semi-obscurity.

Stacey merely dived, in hot silence, for the man’s throat, and fastened his hands upon it tensely.

The victim struck out wildly, gasped, kicked, but Stacey bent him back and leaned over, sinking his thumbs deeper and deeper with every ounce of his great strength into the fleshy throat. And, as he pressed, he had the delirious exultant delusion that he was strangling all humanity. His teeth were set. His eyes were terrible with hatred.

The man’s face grew violet, his eyes protruded loathsomely, his gurgling mouth opened to press out a swollen tongue. Then all at once he relaxed weakly, his whole body limp. Stacey flung him off, and he fell in a sprawled motionless heap to the ground.

Stacey looked down for a moment and pushed the body with the toe of his shoe, then turned away, wiping his hands on his handkerchief. He was quite calm again, fierce, but with no further impulse to kill.

He did not go back and fight his way into the crowd once more. Where was the use? He could not break through. Instead, he followed the alley in, leaving the roar of the crowd behind him, and came out eventually into another street, parallel with the one he had left. It, too, was crowded, but not densely like the first. Stacey made his way off from it swiftly, and before long reached still another street, empty, silent.

But from back over there behind the intervening house-walls came yet wilder noise and crackling volleys of shots. They had got the negro, Stacey supposed.

He strode on for a long, long time—half an hour? an hour?—heedless of direction, turning corners aimlessly, until at last he was walking up a street down which, toward him, people were flowing in groups, talking loudly. The show was over, no doubt, the audience dispersing.

He heard excited comments. “The nigger got his, all right!”—“Damn shame about the mayor!”—“Oh, I dunno! Too damn fresh!”

Stacey whirled about and caught the man who had said it was a shame. “Did they kill the mayor?” he demanded.

The man addressed stared, open-mouthed, with frightened eyes at Stacey’s stern face. “N-no!” he stammered. “They hung him up tw-twice, but he was—was cut down. He’s all right, I guess. Th-they got him away. I said it was a damned shame,” he added weakly, trying to release himself from Stacey’s grasp.

Again he walked aimlessly for a long while, but at last, making a wide curve, he turned back toward the noise that still came in broken waves from the riot centre.

Finally, led by the glow of the fire, he approached the court-house once more, but now from the north. On this side it was not flush with the street but set in some fifty yards behind an ornamental grass-plot.

Street, grass-plot and curving walks were covered with a howling throng, not so thick as to prevent passage, but rushing wildly this way and that under the red light from the burning building.

The centre of the confusion Stacey presently made out to be a motor car careering about through the crowd, that shouted exultantly and stumbled back out of its path.

All at once it bore down on Stacey. He sprang aside to avoid it, then, looking back, saw that after it, at the end of a rope, trailed a shapeless bumping object.

The rope that towed this curious object caught for a moment on an electric light pole, the car came to a temporary halt, and Stacey, bending over to look at the thing more closely, perceived that it was the charred, naked and limbless torso of a man.

Three hysterical girls, their hats awry, their arms linked, pushed him out of the way and kicked, squealing, at the dead flesh.

He found a small lunch-room open in a neighboring street. It was crowded with genial exulting ex-rioters. But Stacey pressed up to the counter, ordered sandwiches and coffee, and gulped them down ravenously. He was frankly famished. This did not shock him. He was too familiar with the physical effects of emotion even to give it a thought. And, indeed, so far as emotion went, he had, despite his almost impassive bearing, gone through more of it than the mob itself. For the mob had hated the negro and the mayor; Stacey had been consumed with hatred of the colossal mob itself—and of all men, all human life.

He left the lunch-room and went to his hotel. As he reached its doorway there was an echoing tramp of steady feet, and he turned to see a company of infantry march past. He saluted, and the officer marching beside the men saluted in return, gravely.

“It’s time!” thought Stacey bitterly. “If I’d had two men and a machine-gun I could have cleared the street.”

He had thought he was done with all sympathy for armies. Error! He would have given his right hand to-night to be in command of his battalion. Not because he cared for law and order. He didn’t give that for law and order! But because he could have saved the mayor—one brave man, a living individual—from the collective beast. And because he could have saved the negro. But mostly because he could have killed! killed!

He entered the hotel. Here, too, though the hour was late, were excited groups. Stacey pushed through them and up to the desk.

But the clerk, his elbows on the desk, was listening to the voluble conversation of a group of commercial travellers and paid no attention.

Stacey seized a paper-weight, lifted it, and flung it down with a crash. “Damn you! The key to four-twelve, I said! And be quick about it!”

The clerk jumped. “Y-yes, sir,” he stammered, and reached a trembling hand for the key.

Probably at a normal moment he would have asserted his right to respect as a free American citizen. To-night things were rather strange.

CHAPTER XI

The next morning, after Stacey had bathed, he stood for a moment, reflecting, then again put on his uniform. In the midst of dressing he paused to look in the telephone directory for the name of the lieutenant whom he had especially liked in his first company and who, he remembered, lived in Omaha. He called up the number.

“Curtis Traile’s house? . . . Oh, this Traile? Good! Stacey Carroll talking.”

He heard a joyful exclamation. “It is! What are you doing here? Where are you?”

“Yes,” said Stacey drily. “Listen, Traile! Can I see you this morning? If you’ll tell me how to get to where you live I’ll—”

“You will not! I’ll be around at the hotel for you inside of twenty minutes.”

Stacey went down into the dining-room and ordered breakfast. Then he unfolded a newspaper. Outwardly he appeared as unmoved as ever. It was only when he came upon the one piece of news he cared about—“Mayor’s Condition Serious! Still Unconscious at Three This Morning! Doctors Hopeful!”—that a ripple of emotion passed over his face. He ate his breakfast calmly.

But on page four he happened upon a small item cursorily recorded which he read with interest.

“At twelve-thirty this morning after the termination of the riot Sergeant of Police Bassett, who was patrolling Seventeenth Street, heard groans issuing from the covered alley leading in behind the Boyd Theatre. On investigating he discovered that they came from a man lying in the alley in a semi-unconscious condition and apparently suffering from attempted strangulation. When able to speak he at first gave his name as John Smith and claimed to have been assaulted, at what time he could not say, by a man wearing U. S. Army uniform. Later he admitted he was Adolph Kraft of 1102 Chicago Street and withdrew his first story, declaring that he was attacked by an unknown man while endeavoring to restrain the rioters from further violence. He was taken to Ford Hospital, where his condition was said to be serious but not critical. The police attach little credence to either story told by Kraft, believing his injury to be the result of some personal vengeance carried out during the confusion of the riot. Kraft was formerly a bar-tender and so far as known has no present occupation. He has been twice convicted of petty offences.”

“So I didn’t kill him, after all,” thought Stacey. “Doesn’t appear that he’d have been much of a loss.” But he reflected dispassionately, merely as noting a fact, that in his assault he had shown the same overwhelming desire to kill that had possessed the mob. That the cause was different on his part did not matter a straw. His intense will to murder had been the same as theirs. Too bad! Not detached enough! Not detached enough! He should have slain the man coldly.

A cordial voice interrupted his meditations. “Well, Captain!—I say! You’re in uniform! You of all people! How come?”

The lieutenant was young and had a fresh pleasant expression when, as now, he was smiling. When, as a moment later, his face grew sober again there was a certain gravity in it, as though a curtain had been dropped,—a hint of the same shadow that hung about Stacey. And this odd contrast in the young man’s face between buoyant youthfulness and weary knowledge impressed Stacey, since he had not seen Traile for many months, and was therefore now seeing him freshly.

“This is fine!” Traile continued swiftly. “But it was pretty rotten of you to be here so long and never let me know. Oh, I know all about it now, you see! Dropped around at Burnham’s on the way here.”

“Fine! He told me about your coming and staying with him. Confound it! he might have let me know he was sick! But no! his wife had to go and wire you!” Traile concluded ruefully, pausing for breath. He sat down.

Stacey nodded. “Have you read the estimable comment in the morning paper?” he asked. “Listen!—‘Whatever the provocation it does not warrant any band of men taking the law into their own hands unless they are prepared to face the judgment of their fellow citizens for such an act.’ Seems sufficiently moderate, don’t you think?”

Traile flushed. “Isn’t that damnable!” he blurted out boyishly. “You must think I live in a rotten town!”

“No,” said Stacey somberly, “I wish I did think so. If that were all there was to it we could band together cheerfully to blow up Omaha.”

“I tell you what, Captain!” Traile cried, his face stern. “We’re going after the leaders if we can get them—going after them hard! There are scores of names listed already; there’ll be twice as many by to-night. General Wood’s been ordered here. Arriving to-morrow morning. And meanwhile we’re organizing the Legion men.”

Stacey nodded. “I thought you would be. That’s what I particularly wanted to see you about. I’m not from here, of course, but I want you to let me in on it.”

Traile’s face radiated a sudden joyful surprise. “You, Captain?” he exclaimed.

“Well,” stammered the other, “I—of course we’ll take you in with a rush. You’re in uniform, too. How come?”

Stacey looked at him thoughtfully. “You needn’t be embarrassed, Traile,” he said. “You’re quite right. I don’t like army stuff and I don’t care a fig about helping maintain law and order in this pleasant world. But if,” he said, his eyes and voice hard, “I can do any fighting against a thousand beasts that tortured one lone individual, and especially that mauled and half killed the one man who stood up to them”—his teeth snapped together—“why, then, I’d like to; that’s all,” he concluded in his normal voice.

Traile stared at him for a moment in silence. “Come home with me,” he said, and rose.

“Just to show you the way some of us feel about this,” the lieutenant remarked presently, “I’ll tell you that I’ve been ’phoning steadily ever since six-thirty this morning. That’s why you got me so promptly when you called up.”

The lieutenant frowned, gave the car a sudden exasperated burst of speed, then slowed down somewhat. “Unsatisfactory. Hang it, they won’t come! Only two of ’em, Mills and Jackson, who’re at my house now.”

“No,” said Traile shortly, “I didn’t. The ones who’ll jump at the job will be the sweet lads who drilled in safe camps and never so much as saw a transport.”

“Oh, well,” Stacey replied coolly, “that wasn’t their fault, and no more’s their point of view. You’re a funny cuss, Traile! Here you are, wanting men to show up, yet I’m blessed if you aren’t railing at the ones who do and praising your men because they don’t!”

“That’s right,” admitted the other, laughing sheepishly. “But then, aren’t we all that—funny cusses, I mean—we chaps who saw the real show?” he added meditatively. “Anyhow, will you try them, Captain? Maybe,” he concluded diffidently, “they’ll come for you.”

Stacey nodded. “I’ll try,” he assented. “How many enlisted men of C Company, your company, live here?”

They turned into a curved driveway leading up to a handsome residence. Traile hurried Stacey out of the car and down the hall of the house to the library.

“Here’s who I made you wait for, boys!” he cried. “You didn’t know—eh?”

The two men in the room sprang to salute, surprise and unmistakable pleasure in their faces.

Stacey felt a sudden touch of gratitude, that was like the warm trickle of a brook into an ice-bound lake. Yet he said little enough to the men in the way of greeting—only a word or two, and shook their hands. Then he plunged at once into business.

“Mills,” he said, “can you and Jackson corral all the men of your company and of D Company too, and get them around here to see me, without obligation to anything—say at noon sharp—that all right, Lieutenant?” Traile nodded.

“Now what’s to do?” Traile remarked impatiently when the men had departed. He was walking nervously about the room.

“You bet I can!” the other cried boyishly, and pushed a bell in the wall. “Leagues and leagues of wine-cellar. Family away in Maine. Whole house to myself. Great! Come in, Blake. Scotch, please,—V.O.P.—and glasses and ice and all that sort of thing.” He flung himself down in a chair. “Funny! Ever since I got back I feel as though I had to be doing something all the time, and yet there isn’t a damned thing I really want to do. You feel that way at all, Captain?”

“Yes,” said Stacey, smoking moodily. “Now let’s see,” he added in a different tone. “Where do we stand? What’s the state of affairs in town?”

Traile sat up, alert again. “Two companies of troops from Fort Crook patrolling the city—couldn’t get here last night in time to do any good,” he added bitterly, “because permission had to be granted from Washington first.”

“Uh-huh. General Wood arriving to-morrow morning. No definite plan of action to be adopted till he gets here. Listing of names of suspects going on rapidly, however.”

Stacey nodded. “Do you think,” he asked meditatively, “that we’ll have a chance to be in on the arresting part of the game? That’s what I want. Patrolling streets is no use.”

“Sure I do! The colonel from the fort said as much. ’T’s just what they will use us of the Legion for, because we know the town. Here are our drinks. Now when we’ve drunk them what in hell shall we do? I know!” he cried triumphantly. “We’ll drive around to the hotel and bring your things over here, where they ought to have been all the time.”

Stacey smiled. “All right,” he assented. “I don’t care much for the night clerk at that hotel.”

At five minutes to twelve the library all at once overflowed with men. There was pride in Stacey’s look as he greeted them.

“Twenty out of twenty-two, sir. Burnham’s sick—as you know better’n any one else, Captain. Monahan, he—he couldn’t come.”

“He couldn’t?” Stacey’s voice was regretful. “That’s too bad.” He paused for a moment, reflecting. Then he drew himself up very straight and gazed at the men, looking keenly from one to another.

“Now look here, men,” he said. “You’re fed up on army stuff and so am I. You know as well as I do that I haven’t got a bit of authority over you. I can’t tell you to go and do anything you don’t want to do. But last night some things were done in this town that I happened to see. And one of them was that a brave man stood out in front of a mob of beasts and said ‘no’ to them. And what happened to him because he said ‘no,’ as any one of you would have said, was—oh, God damn it! you know what it was!”

“He was your mayor,” he continued after a moment, “but it isn’t that I care about. What I care about is that he was a man. You fought the Germans and no one knows better than I how you fought them. Well, there were men among the Germans, decent men, whatever we think about what they fought for. In this mob last night there weren’t any men—just beasts. And I ask you—just ask you, mind!—if you’ll turn in with Lieutenant Traile and me and go after them. That’s all,” he concluded, and shut his teeth with a snap.

There was an instant’s pause. Then: “I guess you know, Captain,” said one of the men awkwardly, “that we’ll all of us do whatever you say—and do it quick!” he added sharply.

“Thanks, Sergeant. Is that the way you all feel about it? . . . Thanks again.”

“Now then,” he went on, in a brisker, matter-of-fact tone. “Lieutenant Traile tells me that we’ll be able to make arrests. Well, that’s what we want. I wouldn’t have called you across the block for the sake of patrolling streets. That’s a Boy Scout job. This is the way it’ll be, I suppose. Officers will get lists given them and go out with a patrol of men to get the animals listed. I don’t know how many men they’ll assign to each officer, but two will be enough. Now listen to me. I only want four of you to show up in uniform. Let’s see—er—Morgan and Isaacs for me, Mills and Jackson for Lieutenant Traile. The rest of you, all sixteen, keep out of uniform. Don’t show up at any Legion meeting. Report to me through Sergeant Peters and Corporals Petitvalle, Blaine and Swanson. You’re to find out where the men are whose names we’ll have given us. They won’t be at their homes, of course, most of them. Then the six of us in uniform will go get them. D’you see? Dirty work! Spies’ work! Informing!” He paused questioningly, but the laughter that greeted his warning was reassuring. “All right, then,” he said easily. “You won’t be very popular, of course, but who wants to be popular with skunks? That’s all for now. Nothing doing till General Wood arrives. The sergeant and the three corporals will come here at nine to-morrow morning—in civilian clothes, mind!—and await instructions. Morgan, Isaacs, Mills, and Jackson show up, in uniform, at the Legion meeting to-morrow after General Wood’s arrival.”

When the men had gone Traile looked at Stacey oddly. “Gee whiz, Captain!” he cried finally, “you’re stronger than ever on love for military discipline, aren’t you? Here you’ve gone and organized a civilian detective service right in the bosom of the army! Oh, cripey!” And he burst out laughing.

“Well,” said Stacey coolly, “what we want is to get those men, isn’t it?”

“Good!” Traile exclaimed. “Lunch is ready. We’ll go down. And this afternoon there’s a Legion meeting. I’ll take you over. Not for the joy of it, but just because I’ll have to present you to the officers—and to the colonel from Fort Crook. He’ll be there.”

The next morning, while the two men were at breakfast, Traile was called to the telephone. He returned after five minutes, his face radiant.

“ ’T’s all right,” he said. “Commander of Legion called me up. General got in two hours ago. Already conferred with governor, city commissioner, police department, everything else conferrable. Police department transferred to the colonel, commanding officer at Fort Crook. Already taken control. All arrests to be military arrests—oh, boy! that means us! General to see Legion members at ten this morning.”

“Damned if I didn’t forget to ask!” Traile looked at Stacey remorsefully. “You really do feel badly about the mayor, don’t you?” he said. “You’re a—a good sort, Captain, if you don’t mind my impertinence in saying so,” he concluded impetuously.

“No,” said Stacey quietly, “I’m not a good sort. I’m only mad,—that’s all; and I’m not forgetting why. You’re ten years younger than I, Traile. You’re rather enjoying the lark.”

“All the same,” the other insisted soberly, “you are sorry about the mayor, as well as mad. I’ll go call up the hospital.”

When they set out for the Legion meeting they left behind them the four N. C. O.’s, in civilian dress, sitting placidly in the library.

“You know,” observed Traile exultantly, as he set his car plunging down the driveway, “it’s not at all a bad thing the general couldn’t get here till to-day. Because all the conglomerate skunks of this town didn’t get on to the fact that we meant business. They’ve had one whole joyful day with nothing doing but a few troops marching around, and they’ve fairly laid themselves open with bragging about what they did Sunday night. One long bright day of practically handing out their names on a platter. Scores and scores of ’em on the lists.”

There were perhaps three hundred Legion members in the large room they entered. General Wood appeared almost at once, the colonel from Fort Crook beside him.

Stacey gazed at the general with interest. A clear honest face, he thought swiftly, with no appearance either of bitterness or the autocratic spirit. A good soldier from his record—not a doubt of it; but why in the world had such a man chosen to be a soldier, and how had he come through it looking like that?

The general wasted no time. “There are long lists of men implicated in this business,” he said to the three hundred. “Your job will be to go out and get them. When you go to make an arrest use no more force than is necessary and use all the force that is necessary. Remember you are sent for a certain man. Come back with him. Bring him in alive if possible. But bring him in. Officers will now report to Colonel M——.” And the general left the room abruptly.

“We’d like just four men for escort—two each, sir, if it’s all the same to you. May we pick the four?” Traile asked.

“Certainly,” said the colonel. “Get service revolvers for yourselves and rifles for your men of the ordnance officer. Bring your prisoners here to police headquarters as you get them.”

“Pshaw!” the lieutenant remarked in disgust, as they were speeding swiftly homeward, with, in the tonneau behind them, the four men, armed now and in uniform, whom Stacey had chosen as escort the day before. “Pshaw! What’s twenty names?”

They left their guard in the hall of Traile’s house, went into the library, and copied their lists for the other four men who were waiting there.

“All right,” Stacey remarked. “Start at it. As soon as any one’s located send one of your men around to report to us. And you’d better detail some one to see that he doesn’t get away in the meantime.”

“Yes, sir,” said Peters. “I guess you’ll find that all right, Captain. We’ve worked out a plan.”

There was nothing to do but wait. Traile fidgeted, but Stacey was impassive. Suddenly he smiled. It had occurred to him that, having learned from the newspaper item the name of the man he had attempted to strangle Sunday night, he could easily lay an information against him and proceed to arrest him—supposing he was sufficiently recovered to permit of arrest. Stacey smiled (he had a rather grisly sense of humor) because he could picture the horror on—what was his name?—Kraft’s brutish face when he saw his assailant himself come for him. But it was only a diverting fancy. Stacey did not follow it up. In the matter of retribution he thought Kraft had had his share.

“You’ll take my car, Captain—you can drive a Cadillac, can’t you?—and I’ll use my father’s,” Traile suggested.

“You go after him, Lieutenant,” said Stacey calmly. “You’re more in a hurry than I am.”

Fifteen minutes later two more were announced to be located, and, as Stacey was on the point of getting into Traile’s car with Morgan and Isaacs (his escort), and the two men who had reported, still another name was brought in.

Stacey went after them. Two he got without difficulty, disregarding their cringing protestations of innocence with the same impassive disgust he had shown—except for one moment—toward the mob on Sunday night. The third, who was hiding in the back room of a saloon and was encouraged by the presence of companions, showed fight, until Stacey rapped him dispassionately on the head with the butt of his revolver. Stacey took his prisoners to the police station and returned to the house.

Traile had already been there and gone again. Two other men were waiting, and Stacey set off once more.

“Beautiful system! Works like a charm. Good man, Peters! Too bad Burnham can’t be in on it!” he thought to himself. He wondered once or twice why Monahan couldn’t come. He felt a little sorry. He had always liked Monahan.

At four o’clock he and Traile had brought the last men on their lists to the police station.

“Pshaw!” said the lieutenant, “it’s too easy!—though two of the ones I got livened things up for a while. Come on! Let’s ask for more.”

“We’ve got all our men, sir,” said Traile, who was spokesman because he knew the officer personally.

“What!” the colonel exclaimed. “All twenty! Why, no one else has got a third through his list yet! Complain they can’t find their men.”

“We were lucky, I guess, sir,” Traile returned. “May we have some more names?”

They received two further lists, dropped them in their pockets, and set off once more.

But when in the library each read his own paper through, Stacey started slightly. There were only nine names on the copied list that he handed to Peters.

“I’ve brought in all but two on my list, sir,” said Traile, “and Captain Carroll all but three on his. They’re beginning to get wise and skip out of town.”

The colonel considered the two men curiously. “How on earth do you do it?” he asked.

Traile grinned. He had always been irrepressibly unmilitary; it was why Stacey had liked him. “Just system, sir,” he replied. “Can you give us some more names?”

The colonel reflected. “Well, I’ll tell you,” he said finally. “I’ll make you out a list—one list, since it’s clear you two work together—of twenty men the others couldn’t get, but who aren’t supposed to have left the city. Go after them and see what you can do, but not till to-morrow morning. Mind! That’s an order! These are a bad lot—crooks, nearly all of them, the chief of police says. I don’t want any midnight casualties among Legion men.”

The two took their escort to their homes, then drove back to the house. But as they got out of the car Stacey paused.

“Traile,” he said, “will you let me have your car for a little while? There’s some one I want to see. I’ll be back inside of an hour.”

“Sure! You know you don’t have to ask.” But Traile could not conceal his boyish curiosity.

“I’ll tell you about it soon—by to-morrow, I hope,” Stacey remarked, climbing back into the car. “You copy out that list for our men, will you? and tell them we’ll be ready at seven to-morrow morning.”

Traile nodded, and Stacey set off. He drove the car slowly along the avenue until he sighted a policeman, then drew up beside him.

“Where’s Dodge Street, please?” he asked. “And where would eight-sixteen be?”

The officer explained carefully, and Stacey drove on. It was a long way to the street he sought, but he reached it at last and found the number—a boarding-house in the section near the railway.

“Hall bedroom on the third floor,” she replied, looking suspiciously at his uniform. “I don’t know if he’s in.”

Stacey went up the stairs and knocked at the door. There was a kind of growl from inside that might have been meant for: “Come in”; so Stacey entered the room.

CHAPTER XII

It was a small bare room, at the other end of which, beside the bed, an enormous red-haired Irishman stood like a herculean statue. He was bent forward in a half-crouching attitude and held menacingly at shoulder height, grasped in both hands, a chair, with the obvious intention of hurling it at the intruder.

Stacey involuntarily started. Then a gleam of appreciation came into his eye. The man’s attitude was magnificent. Rodin might have posed him.

“Well, upon my word, Monahan,” he said easily, “you give a fellow a cordial reception!” And he dropped into a chair—the only other one in the room.

The man lowered his chair slowly, a look of blank amazement, changing gradually to gloom, coming over his face.

“Christ Almighty! Captain!” he muttered finally. “So it’s you that’s come to arrest me!”

The man shook his red hair back from his forehead and stood there, gazing at Stacey.

“Sit down, can’t you?” said Stacey sharply. “You take up too damned much room that way.”

A faint smile curved the giant’s mouth and wrinkled the corners of his eyes. He sat down carefully, the chair creaking beneath him.

Stacey reflected, staring at him thoughtfully. “Monahan,” he began at last, “I found your name on a list of men I was to go out and get for that Sunday night row. What’s the meaning of that?”

The Irishman’s face flamed. “I didn’t have a thing to do with it!” he burst out.

“Oh, hell! I know you didn’t!” said Stacey impatiently. “You were,” he continued slowly, “the most unmanageable man in my battalion (and the one I cared most for,” he added to himself). “You were quarrelsome, you had fits of sullenness, you made me trouble on an average about seven days a week, and you broke every rule it was possible to break, but you wouldn’t any more have been part of a mob to pick on a man than you’d have turned tail and run in an attack. Now what is this charge about?”

A slow smile had spread over Monahan’s vast face. “That’s a hell of a fine character you’ve given me, Captain dear!” he observed.

“Well, I’ll tell you the whole story, Captain,” he began. “I don’t hold much with niggers, but I don’t hold neither with getting five thousand men together—real bold-like—and going out and lynching one nigger. And Sunday night when I seen what was doing I was pretty mad. But not half as mad as I was when right in front of my nose a bunch of white-livered sons of bitches got hold of the mayor, who was acting like a man, and strung him up—by God! strung him up to a pole! I was there, Captain, and I pitched in and I fought the dirtiest I knew how—’n’ you know whether we was trained to fight dirty or not. And by ’n’ by I kicked one man in the guts and another in the knee—me getting madder ’n’ madder because all th’ time there was the mayor swinging and twitching up there—but some one else got up the pole ’n’ cut him down before I could get there, ’n’ then some damn cold-blooded skunk of a photographer took a flash-light picture, ’n’ then all of a sudden there’s Sergeant McCarthy of the police beside me, ’n’ he says: ‘By God! Monahan! I didn’t think it of you!’ So there I am in the photograph at headquarters ’s clear as life, and there’s McCarthy to testify I was one of them that lynched th’ mayor.” He paused, an expression of resentment and resignation on his face.

Stacey considered him thoughtfully. “Why don’t you go around to police headquarters, give yourself up, and tell the truth?”

Monahan shook his head. “There wouldn’t anybody believe me, Captain,” he said sullenly. “ ‘Fat story, me lad, with your record!’ they’d say. They’d laugh at me.”

“I’ve been twice in the jug, Captain, since I got back,” the Irishman growled, “and I’ll tell you about that, too, if you’ll listen.

“When I got back from across—and I wish to God I’d never come back!—I got me a job at the packing-house. Well, who should I find for my foreman but a white-livered skunk called Barton? ’N’ I’ll tell you about Barton, too. Barton, he got exempted from the draft as being the sole support of one poor aged mother ’n’ two poor little sisters. Now the truth about that skunk was, so help me God! that he never done one thing for them—not a red cent had he given them for years, Captain! All the little they had come to them from a brother’s son of the old lady.

Monahan paused and thrust his shaggy red head forward. His eyes gleamed dangerously.

“I had a girl, Captain, when I went away,” he went on, in a deep rumbling voice, “and a good girl she was. But this Barton, he comes shining around and shining around, ’n’ she falls for him like a little fool, ’n’ after a while he goes ’n’ marries her,—which he wouldn’t have done, Barton wouldn’t, if it hadn’t been that she had two brothers, big strong up-standing men who sort of urged him on.

“Well, when I see this skunk there for my foreman things just busted up inside me, ’n’ the very first day at th’ noon hour I laid for him in a quiet place in the yard and I says: ‘Now fight, you God-damned, white-livered son of a bastard German skunk!’ ’N’ Barton hollered for help and a lot of men come running, but not before I’d handled him a little rough—though not half what I could have done with more time. Well, would you believe it, Captain? for that little bit of righteous trifling th’ judge give me six days!”

The aggrieved innocence in the Irishman’s face was too much. Stacey struggled, then gave up and burst out laughing. “Go on! Go on, Jim!” he cried at last.

Monahan, too, had laughed, finally, but at Stacey’s words his face grew dark again. “When I come out,” he continued angrily, “I went back for my job, ’n’ they wouldn’t give it to me, the rotten skunks! ’N’ they’d blacklisted me, too. Not another job in any packing-house could I get.” He paused, with a growl.

Stacey considered him, at once sympathetically and curiously. He noted that in recounting the damning evidence of the flash-light picture and McCarthy’s misinterpretation of his presence at the lynching, Monahan had displayed only a melancholy resentment against fate; it was his later discovery that an organization was against him which shook him with anger. Now McCarthy’s remark had been grossly unjust, and the attitude of Monahan’s employers was not altogether so; yet Stacey understood the distinction—understood it emotionally. His heart went out to Monahan. They were kin.

But the Irishman continued his tale. “ ’N’ then I said I’d do them dirt, ’n’ I done it, Captain. There was a strike among the boys before long, ’n’ ’twas me more than any other that brought it about. ’N’ they knew ’twas me, the dirty packers! but never a thing could they get on me. ’N’ th’ strike cost them money—the only thing that hurts a packer, Captain. Then there were scabs ’n’ fighting, ’n’ I couldn’t keep out of it, ’n’ that time they caught me, ’n’ the judge—a decent sort of man and not knowing the rights of the story neither—give me a month, ’n’ they was sore because they couldn’t fix it so I’d get five years.

“ ’N’ that’s all, Captain. But you can see how I can’t go to the police, quiet-like, ’n’ tell them th’ truth about Sunday night.”

“Well, look here!” he said at last. “I didn’t say anything about you or why I didn’t bring you in, but Traile” (when he spoke to Monahan Stacey did not say “Lieutenant Traile”) “Traile, though he didn’t know your name was on my list, happened to say something that would lead the authorities to believe you’d left town, along with a good many others. Why don’t you?”

“I dunno,” replied the Irishman sullenly. “I didn’t like to beat it as if I’d really been one of them skunks that lynched th’ mayor.”

“Lord bless you, yes, Captain!” the man interrupted. “The boys come ’n’ offered me all I’d’ve needed.”

Stacey gazed at him. “D’you mean that our boys did that?” he demanded. “Peters and Swanson and Petitvalle and the rest of them?”

“Then, damn it all! they’ve known about this charge against you ever since I got them together, and not one of them’s come to me and told me!”

Monahan grinned. “Sure not, Captain!” he replied. “They done what you told them to, because you’re you, ’n’, as far as I can see, they’re enjoying themselves doing it, it not being what you might call strictly according to rule. But they didn’t any of them come ’n’ lay their curly heads on your breast ’n’ sob out their own little troubles.”

Stacey fumed, then got over it, and fell into thought. Here were these men who’d go to hell with him—at least, Burnham had said they would—yet he couldn’t get at them, not really. What difficult secret souls they had! He sighed. Yet somehow he was proud of their reserve.

“Besides,” Monahan remarked, as a final shot, “I give them orders they was to say nothing to you about me.”

“Oh, you did!” said Stacey drily. “You’ve been giving too many orders. It’s my turn. Now listen to me, you damned red-headed fire-brand! To-morrow afternoon I’ll try to see General Wood and I’ll tell him about you. He’s a square man and white, and I think he’ll fix the thing up. But, just in case he shouldn’t, you’ll decamp, beat it, quit this lovely city, right now. And you’ll take money from me to do that. (Confound it!” he reflected, “I’ll have to borrow money from Traile to get home myself!) And you’ll let me know where you are, but not till to-morrow night, so that I won’t know when I see the general.”

A broad grin had spread over Monahan’s face, giving it an expression of gigantic good humor. “Faith! Captain,” he drawled, with a touch of brogue in his intonation, “as an example of sacred military discipline you’re in a class by yourself, you are! An Irishman you are at heart, Captain. And it’s sorry I am to have to disobey you. But I’d feel fine, wouldn’t I? to have General Wood saying sternly: ‘And where is this man, Captain Carroll?’ and you replying sweetly: ‘I gave him money ’n’ told him to quit the town, General!’ No, no, Captain! Right here will I sit ’n’ wait for you to come ’n’ say: ‘All is forgiven, Jim dear!’ or for the police to come ’n’ get me.”

Stacey, half furious, half delighted, capitulated. “Oh, well,” he said, “I hope you’ll go out and get something to eat now and then.” He rose to go, then paused. “Look here! You told me about all this. Why couldn’t you have told Traile?” he asked curiously. “He’s a good sort and he knows every one here. He’d have cleared things up.”

But the expression of sullen hostility had returned to Monahan’s face. “Traile’s decent enough, but a swell,” he growled.

“Rot! Traile’s father’s rich; so’s mine. No difference at all. I’m a swell, too,” Stacey observed, almost gaily.

“You can call yourself names at your pleasure, Captain,” said Monahan, “but let any one else say that about you and I’ll break his head.”

He and Traile found more zest in their work next day. Not being fools, they accepted Peters’ quiet advice that all six of them make the arrests together. Even so, they had their hands full. These, thought Stacey grimly more than once, were the men they were after. Four they took, with difficulty, in the attic of a disreputable boarding-house, four in a brothel, and five on a river barge after a running fight during which Traile got a knife thrust in his arm and Jackson a bullet in the shoulder. The rest they picked up separately or in pairs. But by five in the afternoon they had got them all—all twenty. Tired and grimy, Traile with his arm in a sling, they reported to the colonel.

“Good work, gentlemen! Good work!” he said soberly. “You even got Voorhies?”

“We did, sir,” replied Traile quietly, “but with two bullets in him, which the captain here put there on my account. Two of our men are hurt—Jackson shot in the shoulder—at the hospital—will be all right; Morgan laid out with a brick—came around after a while—a bit groggy now, that’s all.”

“You’ve done well. I’ll let the general know. I think this ends it. You can retire into the bosoms of your families and cease calling me ‘sir’—always a strain on National Army men, I observe. Congratulations, Captain Carroll.”

“Thank you, Colonel,” Stacey replied. “There was a favor I wanted to ask, sir,” he added. “Do you think it would be possible for me to see General Wood for a very few minutes?”

“I’ll find out,” said the colonel. “I feel sure he’ll be glad to see you.” And he left the room.

“Tell you all about it when I come out, Traile,” Stacey remarked abstractedly, thinking over what words he should use.

“This way, Captain,” said the colonel, returning presently. He led Stacey down a hall to a door at which he knocked. He opened it, and Stacey went through, alone, into the room beyond.

It was a large office-room, with in the centre a desk, at the further side of which General Wood was seated.

But the general rose and held out his hand across the desk. “Come in, Captain Carroll,” he said, with his pleasant smile, and shook Stacey’s hand. “Sit down. I see you wear the D. S. C. ribbon. My congratulations.”

The general considered him. “I’m glad you asked to see me, Captain,” he continued, sitting back in his chair, “because Colonel M—— has just told me of the extraordinary success you and Lieutenant Traile have had in making arrests. I have an entirely unmilitary curiosity to know how you did it.”

“Oh, well, sir,” said Stacey, “we didn’t really play fair. It happens that, though I’m not from Omaha, twenty-two of my men live here. I organized twenty of them, sir, and had sixteen of them go out in civilian clothes and locate the men on our lists.”

The general stared, then began to smile. Finally he laughed—a pleasant kindly laugh. “Most unmilitary,” he remarked, “but efficient.” Suddenly he became thoughtful. “And your men were willing to do that for you?”

“Yes, sir. One of the other two is in bed with pneumonia. It’s about the twenty-second man that I should like to speak to you, sir.”

“His name is Monahan, sir, a wild Irishman, the most difficult man I ever had and the best. He was on my second list of men to arrest.”

“Because he is totally innocent, sir,” Stacey returned steadily, “but couldn’t prove it in court.”

“We’ll waive for a moment your action in not carrying out orders. How do you know he’s innocent?”

“Because, sir, with all his unruliness, this is exactly the sort of thing he couldn’t do. And, besides, he told me the real story himself. He wouldn’t lie to me.”

And Stacey very swiftly repeated Monahan’s story. As he did so, he watched the general’s face closely. A little gleam, Stacey thought, came into the candid blue eyes at the mention of Monahan’s black-listing. Leonard Wood, too, knew what it meant to be a man against a combination. When Stacey had finished the general made some hasty notes on a scratch-block. Then he looked up again.

“I’m glad you brought this matter up to me, Captain,” he said soberly. “I’ll see to it that the charge against Monahan is dismissed. I want every man punished who was implicated in Sunday night’s shameful affair; I don’t want any man dragged into it on account of something else he may have done. No taking advantage of this to settle old scores. However,” he concluded, with a smile, “you can’t expect me to approve officially of your action, can you?”

But the general detained him. “Captain,” he asked, his mouth twitching slightly, “when you were in the service did you frequently employ your—er—admirable spirit of personal initiative?”

“And—excuse my curiosity!—was it because of that occasion that you received your decoration?”

The general laughed and stood up. “Good-bye, Captain Carroll, and thanks,” he said.

“Come on, Traile,” he said, a moment later. “Let’s drive like the devil over to Monahan’s place—on Dodge Street it is. I’ll tell you all about it on the way.”

But, with nothing left for him to do, apathy descended on Stacey. Despite Traile’s pleading he would not remain after the next night, when he took a late train for Vernon. He did not want to see Traile any longer. He did not want to see any one. He desired only to get away from this city. But he did not for a moment fancy that the train would carry him to any place better or even different. All life was like that. You travelled and travelled and got nowhere. One of those amusement booths where you sat perfectly still and received an illusion of motion from a painted landscape rolled swiftly past you.

CHAPTER XIII

If Stacey had been at all curious about himself he would probably have thought that his Omaha adventure had left him precisely as he was before. He might only have been concerned at the memory of the sudden ungovernable passion to which he had fallen a prey on the night of the lynching. But he was not interested in himself, even faintly. Impressions of others and, especially, impressions of things flowed in upon him, since that was the way he was made, but chaotically, since he did not seek them or try consciously to arrange them. He was apathetic but not weary. He saw life as flashes of lightning in chaos. Or, no, the figure was too grandiose. Sparks travelling with haphazard chain-like velocity in the soot of a chimney.

There was a wash-out on the road, and Stacey’s train was delayed for many hours, so that he did not reach Vernon until late in the afternoon. He hired a taxi and drove home. It was the fashionable hour. Vernon had certainly become metropolitan of late years. The streets were thronged, and the handsome boulevard into which the taxi presently turned was a river of gleaming motor cars, chauffeur in livery on the front seat, perfectly gowned women in the tonneau. Smooth, very! The mellow October coolness in the air and the lights that began to shine palely against the sunset played up to it. People waved to Stacey, smiling at his plebeian conveyance, and he lifted his hat abstractedly. But at heart he was full of a sick distaste for all this elegance, this physical luxury, that seemed to him not so much to hide as to reveal what lay beneath—the vulgarity, the stupidity, the greed.

Arrived at home, he bathed and dressed, then went down to the library, where he sipped a high-ball moodily and waited for his father.

Mr. Carroll’s handsome face lighted up at sight of his son. “Well, well, this is fine!” he exclaimed. “When did you get back? And what have you been doing in that disgraceful place all this time?”

“Oh, I saw the riot,” said Stacey, shaking hands, “and stayed on for the sequel. May I get you a high-ball, sir?”

“No. Come into the dining-room. I’ll mix a cocktail. Parker will have had the ice all ready. We can talk at the same time.”

“Disgraceful, the whole business!” Mr. Carroll went on, emphasizing his words by a vigorous agitation of the silver shaker. “There’s never been a time in the history of this country when respect for law and order was at so low an ebb.” He poured his cocktail into a glass and took it over to the table. “Come on, son,” he said, “sit down. Dinner will be served in a few minutes, I dare say. Sit down and tell me the whole story. Your health, my boy!”

“Thank you, sir,” said Stacey, obeying. “But there isn’t very much to tell. I’ll spare you details of the lynching itself—they were in all your papers, of course. After the riot the Legion men organized, and, as I happened to have my uniform with me, I went in with them and helped arrest a lot of the people implicated. Young Traile and I worked together.”

Mr. Carroll sat up straight, his eyes shining. “You did that? Good for you, Stacey! Tell me all about it.”

Stacey related his experiences, stressing details which seemed unimportant to himself, such as his and the lieutenant’s adventures in making the arrests, and omitting to speak of Monahan, because he thought his father would not approve of his behavior in that matter, and Stacey, though with a sort of melancholy absence of feeling, wanted to be agreeable to his father. Parker had served the soup, but Mr. Carroll, though he prized dinner highly, left it untouched until Stacey had finished speaking.

“Good!” he cried then, “good! I’m proud of you. But, hang it!” he added boyishly, “how adventures do dog you about, don’t they? So General Wood was the man for the job? I knew he’d prove to be.”

“A good man!” remarked Mr. Carroll, eating his soup now. “I hope he’ll be our next president.”

Mr. Carroll’s face was radiant. “Glad you feel the same way about it. We’ve had enough of the waste and radicalism and shilly-shallying of this administration,” he asserted. “We want a strong safe man for president, representing a decent party. General Wood fills the bill.”

“Oh,” said Stacey thoughtlessly, “I don’t care anything about all that. One party seems to me as silly as the other. I only want General Wood to be elected president because I suppose he wants to be president and I’d like him to have whatever he wants.”

But at these words the elation had vanished from Mr. Carroll’s face. It looked grave now and sad. Stacey bit his lip. Why the devil, he thought angrily, couldn’t he have kept his mouth shut? He didn’t seem to have decent control over his words.

But they could neither of them keep off from subjects on which they disagreed, these being nearly all conceivable subjects except their unreasoning mutual affection, which would not have lent itself especially well to conversation even had Mr. Carroll not been shy and Stacey intensely reserved. It was Mr. Carroll’s turn next.

“All that business, that damnable riot,” he said, as though involuntarily, a fanatical gleam in his eye, “I felt sure at the time that there was Bolshevism behind it. Did you see any evidence of that?”

“No, sir,” returned Stacey drily. He tried to keep his tone expressionless, knowing that his father literally couldn’t help making the remark—the thing was an obsession; but he probably, in spite of himself, revealed the disdain his father must have known the question would arouse in him. The rest of the dinner passed off in a dreary attempt to revive the faded cordiality.

“Thanks, no, sir. I’ve really got to go out and make a call,” Stacey returned. He knew he was being cruel. There was a faint wistfulness about his father that touched Stacey dully; but he simply could not endure the repression he must exert upon himself if he were to stay there and talk with his father. All his words would have to be studied, never casual. He was incapable of it.

“All right,” said Mr. Carroll. “You’ve been away a week. Of course there are people you want to see. I’ll read a little while, then go up to bed. Good night.”

But in the hall outside he hesitated for a moment, and when he had gone to the garage and brought out his car he stopped it beside the house and returned to the living-room. He saw, as he opened the door, that his father was not reading but playing solitaire, and this, too, touched Stacey a little. Mr. Carroll looked up in surprise.

“I’m going to run over to see Phil and Catherine Blair for a little while,” Stacey said. “They don’t even know where I’ve been, and I ought to go. It occurred to me, sir, that just possibly you’d like to drive over there with me. Would you care to?”

Stacey had not the slightest idea that his father would accept. Mr. Carroll disliked going out in the evening. But, to Stacey’s surprise, he dropped his cards and rose at once.

“Why, yes, son, I’ll be glad to go along, if you really want me,” he replied. “I like your friends, the Blairs,” he added, in an apologetic tone, when he and Stacey were in the car. “Phil’s a thoughtful fellow, with talent, too, I should judge, though I don’t pretend to know anything about architecture. And Catherine’s a fine girl, an unusual girl.”

Phil himself opened the door, a look of warm pleasure glowing in his face. “Well, where the deuce have you been, Stacey?” he cried. “This is awfully good of you, Mr. Carroll! Come in! Come in!” And he ushered them into the house.

The sitting-room glowed, too. Light from a shaded reading-lamp fell on Catherine’s hair and face, illuminating the fine close-grained skin and accentuating the firm bony structure beneath it. Catherine was sitting in a low easy chair, over the arms of which her two sons leaned closely to gaze down at the large book that lay open on her knees. She rose swiftly at sight of her guests, but with a shy grace. Her hand went to her hair.

For just an instant, while he held them off, he considered the scene wistfully. It all seemed so far from any mood his tortured inharmonious spirit was able to achieve.

But Catherine, after a faint smile at him, was shaking hands with his father, and the boys were growing importunate.

“Come on, Uncle Stacey!” Carter shouted. “Do ‘Fly away, Jack!’ for him! Come on! Over here!”

“Carter! Carter!” said his mother. “Not so loud! And let Uncle Stacey alone.”

“No, but he wants to play, don’t you, Uncle Stacey?” Carter insisted, moderating his voice, however.

“Sure!” said Stacey. “Only wouldn’t you—er—just as lief try some other game?”

“No. ‘Fly away, Jack!’ ” the boy returned firmly. “I do it for him sometimes, and he can’t ever find them. Only,” he added in a tremendous whisper, “they come off kind of often.”

Stacey set patiently about the game, In a way it was a relief—like knitting, he supposed. But, as he played it, he heard his father at the other end of the room proudly telling Phil and Catherine of the Omaha adventure, and an odd dream-like sensation came over Stacey of not knowing which was real—this, the childish game with the boys, or that, the story his father was repeating. Neither, perhaps.

Phil came over and stood near him. “A sad day for you that you introduced that game!” he remarked.

“Oh, I don’t know! I don’t mind it,” Stacey returned. “ ‘Come back, Jack! Come back, Jill!’ ”

(“Did I really introduce it?” he thought hazily. “Was it really I or some ancestor of mine?”)

“Enough! That will do now,” said Phil presently. “Up you go, boys! To bed! Run! Beat it!”

Carter rushed across the room. “Mother! Mother!” he cried, both on the way and after arrival, “daddy says you’ll let him say ‘beat it!’ Will you? Then why won’t you let me?”

“Sh!” said Catherine, looking a little dazed. “Carter, this is Uncle Stacey’s father. What will he think of you if you shout that way?”

The boy shook Mr. Carroll’s extended hand politely. “But, mother,” he repeated, “daddy said—”

“Yes, I know. You tell daddy that I say he’s a great goose and that geese can say what they please, I suppose. Then run up to bed and see if you can help Jack undress nicely. I’ll come up and kiss you both good night when you’re ready.”

However, at the door Carter turned and ran back, his brother following like a faithful dog.

“I guess I forgot to say thank you, Uncle Stacey, for Jack and Jill,” he observed.

“Triumphant exit, wasn’t it?” Phil remarked. “Come out on the porch with me, Stacey. It will rest you.”

They went out and walked up and down together. There was a pleasant coolness in the air. The city glittered beneath them.

“Sorry you ran into all that mess in Omaha,” Phil said presently. “Must have given you a rotten sense of discouragement.” He waited, as though for a reply, but Stacey made none. “The trouble with crowds is, I suppose,” he continued thoughtfully, “that you get only the least common denominator. What all men have in common is their primitive passions. It’s only what each has by himself that counts to his credit. Any man is better than a crowd.” He paused again.

Philip Blair ceased walking, leaned back against the railing of the porch, and considered Stacey, with a smile. “By the way,” he remarked irrelevantly, “yesterday I got a statement of receipts and disbursements from the Fund for Viennese Children.”

Stacey frowned. “Oh, you did!” he said drily. “And how did you happen to get it? I can guess.”

“Oh,” Phil returned simply, “Catherine and I send what we can.” He laughed a pleasant laugh. “You hypocrite!” he exclaimed. “Oh, you damned hypocrite!”

Stacey shook his head. “It’s no use gunning around in me for virtue, Phil,” he said quietly. “What I gave them hasn’t at all the meaning of what you’ve given them, whatever that may be. I’ve kept out two hundred a month for myself.”

“Shucks!” Phil exclaimed disgustedly. “You’re becoming puerile, Stacey! Do you think I care about the amount—if any—of self-sacrifice that you showed? The only thing that interests me is that you were interested in the suffering of Viennese children.”

Stacey gazed away absently at the gleaming city. “I don’t see anything strange about that,” he said finally. “There’s been enough suffering in the world, especially among children. You think, Phil, that I have some malevolent philosophy of life. You’re mistaken. I haven’t any philosophy. It’s only that every day I run across suffering—so much of it—that’s caused deliberately. Then I get a craving to destroy. That’s all,” he concluded listlessly.

But Stacey was walking up and down again. Presently he paused before the large window that opened into the sitting-room. He gazed in at Catherine and his father.

Phil, who had followed Stacey and stood now at his shoulder, smiled. “That always seems to me an unfair advantage to take of people,” he said, “to watch them when they don’t know you’re there—like looking at them in their sleep. No,—worse than that. For their personality is one thing when it’s focussed on you, quite another focussed on some one else. You’re not meant to see the other. It contains no adaptation to you.”

“That’s why it’s a relief,” Stacey returned. “For a brief moment you get the sense of being yourself abolished, and experience peace.”

“H’m!” said Phil reflectively. “Also,” he added, after a pause, “I dare say this matter of personal adaptation to the individual accounts for the emptiness of talk—and thought—in a group. The adaptation is necessarily lacking.”

Stacey smiled faintly. “Always thorough, Phil, aren’t you?” he observed. He had a strange shadowy sense of being back in his old pre-war relationship to Phil. There was pleasure in this for Stacey, but melancholy also, since he knew it was an illusion. He continued to gaze in through the window at his father and Catherine.

Mr. Carroll was leaning forward in his chair, with a certain courtliness, and smiling; Catherine’s face in the light from the electric lamp appeared mobile and full of expression. They seemed to be talking freely.

“I never saw Catherine so bold before,” Stacey remarked finally, turning away. “I swear I’m jealous.”

“Oh,” Phil returned quietly, “she’s always shyer with you than with any one else.”

“Is she? That’s silly. Now what do you suppose they’re talking about?” asked Stacey idly.

“We were watching you from outside the window,” he announced maliciously, as they reëntered the room. Catherine flushed. “Phil said—”

“Oh, shut up, Stacey!” Phil interrupted. “I won’t have my wife teased. By the way, your friend, Mrs. Latimer, has been here a number of times.”

“Very much,” she replied, the old shyness back again, stronger than ever, in voice and face. Perhaps she was vexed with it and struggled against it, for: “The last time she came she brought her daughter, Mrs. Price, with her,” Catherine added, then bit her lip, lest she should have said something awkward.

“Marian?” Stacey exclaimed. But he was not perturbed. He had forgotten Marian completely in the last week. He was merely surprised; for he somehow could not fancy Marian and Catherine together.

“Mrs. Latimer is a fine woman, with an affected idiot of a husband,” Mr. Carroll observed. “Can’t say I care much for Marian.”

Stacey smiled, almost imperceptibly. What a straightforward loyal character his father had, he thought. Everything clear, black-and-white. And never more kindly than here now with Phil and Catherine. Stacey had a feeling of looking at his father from a long way off—or—or—at the reflection of him in a mirror. What an odd blurred evening—and pleasant! He fell into a reverie while the others talked. Why should there be this wistfulness about his father? Mr. Carroll had a strong personality; he could manage men; decisions snapped, clean-cut, from his mind. Perhaps he was wistful because he had no grown-up life outside of business. His ideas on general subjects were immature.

But before long Mr. Carroll rose. “Come on, Stacey!” he remarked. “Phil has to go to work early to-morrow, and Catherine must be tired, too. You don’t mind a grandfather calling you by your first name?” he asked her, with a pleasant smile.

“ ’Night, Phil!” said Stacey at the door, and shook his friend’s hand casually.

“Nice people, very!” his father observed, after they had driven for some minutes in silence. “But I don’t think Phil looks well, do you?”

“No?” returned Stacey, surprised. “I thought he seemed gayer to-night than for a long while. He’s always been atrociously thin, you know.”

But the strange soft sense of haziness vanished in the night. Next morning, after breakfast, Stacey stood looking absently out of his study window, with no sense but of a poignant emptiness.

Parker came up after a time to say that Mrs. Latimer had called to see him; but even at this Stacey felt nothing save a little surprise.

He went down at once and greeted Mrs. Latimer pleasantly. She looked, he thought, rather worn, faintly older; but he said to himself that this was probably the effect of the cruel morning light. Moreover, as soon as she spoke and smiled, the impression vanished, as carelessly as it had come.

“Of course you don’t want to see me or you’d have come to my house,” she said, “but I really wanted to see you, so I couldn’t resist coming. Silly, wasn’t it?”

“Not at all,” he replied. “An excellent idea. What the Italians call geniale. Piquant, too, with just a touch of impropriety about it, since if we had been of the same age we’d undoubtedly have married.”

He was merely saying words, letting them say themselves, but Mrs. Latimer flushed like a girl. “Stacey!” she cried. “Shame on you!”

“Come on up to my study, if you don’t mind climbing the stairs,” he suggested. “That will make it still worse.”

She laughed, and they went up. But when they had sat down they both became silent.

Mrs. Latimer gave him a quick curious glance, but there was nothing except polite interest in his face and tone. Nor, indeed, was there more than that in his thoughts. He asked after Marian because she had been recalled to his mind the night before and because Mrs. Latimer was her mother.

“To tell the truth, I don’t know,” she replied. “I don’t think Marian is particularly happy, but then I don’t think she ever was. Marian is enigmatic because she has two such different sides to her nature that neither can be the truth about her. And what that truth is, I, for one, have long since given up trying to discover. Marian seems to me to drift, rather carelessly and recklessly, as though she were saying: ‘What does it matter? It’s not really I who am drifting.’ ”

Stacey showed some interest in this. “That’s rather profound,” he observed appreciatively. “Hope you don’t do that sort of thing with me.”

Mrs. Latimer smiled. “I have to,” she remarked, “since you won’t.” Again there was a silence. “Stacey,” she said abruptly, “I’m so very sorry you happened into that terrible affair in Omaha. It seems to me sometimes that some ugly fate is dogging you, to single out everything evil and say: ‘Here! Don’t overlook this! Here’s something really horrid!’ It isn’t fair! It simply isn’t fair!” she concluded, almost passionately.

Stacey raised his eyebrows. “It’s awfully good of you to be so considerate of me,” he replied. “I appreciate it.” (And, indeed, he tried to.) “Philip Blair said the same thing last evening—by the way, I’m very glad you’ve taken to going around there—but really there’s nothing to be perturbed about. I’m not changed by Omaha. This was no worse than a thousand things I saw, almost daily, in France. Worse? It was nothing!” Suddenly his face twitched. “If you’d seen my friend, Gryce, die!” He drew his hand across his forehead. “Come!” he said. “One doesn’t talk of things like that.”

Mrs. Latimer’s face had looked perplexed and doubtful at Stacey’s initial coolness; it became grave again and affectionately apprehensive now.

“It isn’t,” she said gently, “that anything you have seen is worse than what you saw in France. It is only the persistent hammering on the same theme.”

“Oh,” he replied, in a hard voice, “I suppose you think I’m being steadily turned into some kind of red revolutionary. Not at all! Quite the opposite, in fact. When I see what there is in men beneath the crust I’m all for preserving the crust—any old crust—the one we’ve got, even!”

“Go away?” he returned. “I can’t go away from myself, can I? I’m just like the rest—with a crust.”

Suddenly one of his hot unreasoning rages swept over him, like a physical thing climbing from his feet to his head.

“It’s no good to do away with myself,” he said in an odd resonant voice, but not loud. “That’s too little. I’d blow up everything with myself—every one—my father with his bigoted prehistoric ideas, your husband with his petulant selfishness, Marian, stony at one moment, sentimentalizing prettily over a rose-petal the next,—all men, all women! And rebuild things? Never! Let them go smash, end, vanish, and leave clean empty space!”

She trembled before his fierceness, but shook her head courageously. “No,” she said, with brave obstinacy, “you wouldn’t.”

“Why not?” he demanded wildly. “Do you think I’ve got any pity in me? Never a drop!” The hot wave of anger passed now, leaving in Stacey only a sick feeling of enhanced emptiness. There were drops of sweat on his forehead.

Again Mrs. Latimer shook her head. “No, I know you haven’t—not at present. But you wouldn’t do it because you’re too courageous. You wouldn’t give up in that way. In spite of you, your strong soul will insist that, bad as everything is, you’ll see what can be done with it.”

“Why?” he asked dully. “It’s all a rotten mess. There’s no scheme—no one—behind it.”

“I didn’t say there was,” she answered steadily. “I only say that any one as strong as you must make a scheme himself.”

“Forgive my violence,” said Stacey apologetically at last. “I get these silly fits when I lose my self-control once in a while. Idleness, they come from, I suppose. Lack of anything to do to work off energy.”

Feeling genuinely embarrassed, he had not been looking at Mrs. Latimer while he spoke. Looking at her now, he was amazed to note the sorrow in her eyes.

“Go away, Stacey!” she murmured. “Go away for a while. I’m—afraid for you.”

“Go away?” he repeated, but gently this time. “Where to? Can you find me access to another planet? Nevertheless,” he added, “I will go if you want me to. Also I note that the pageant season is on now. It will always be something to avoid that. What is it this time?”

Mrs. Latimer laughed hysterically. “ ‘V-Vernon, Past and—Present.’ The—the whole story of Vernon.”

CHAPTER XIV

It occurred to Stacey, however, that he had spent more than he could afford lately and had nothing with which to go on his travels. And this seemed an excellent excuse for remaining at home. But he presently recollected that on one War Christmas his father had made him a gift of Liberty bonds. He sold one, with a sense of resignation. He did not feel irony in the ease with which he could solve all financial difficulties, for the idea of personal virtue, asceticism, was absent from his mind. He was sending all that money to Vienna because he wanted to send it, not because he felt he ought to; he kept out two hundred dollars a month because he wanted them; and he sold a thousand-dollar bond now simply because if he was to go on a journey he needed money.

It is much more difficult to understand why he was going on a journey at all. He was not affectionate enough to be going simply because Mrs. Latimer had asked him to. And one can hardly take seriously the reason he gave his sister, Julie.

He drove around to her house the afternoon before his departure, and on his way caught sight of Irene Loeffler walking briskly toward him and signalling violently. He waved his hat, but dashed by her in a burst of speed.

“You know, Julie,” he said, a few minutes later, sprawling on the davenport in his sister’s living-room, “it’s all due to you that I’m going away.”

“Absolutely! You lure me to your house, and then you turn an unscrupulous woman loose on me, and she makes my life unbearable, and I—”

He sat up straight and gazed at his sister. “Jul-ia,” he said, “you know me to be modest, you know how little I esteem my personal charm, caring more for simple things such as goodness and—”

“Oh, yes,” Julie interrupted, “I know all that! I want to hear about Irene.”

“Therefore,” he continued, “when, from never having seen the lady at all, I began to see her almost daily, and, when I didn’t see her, to get invitations to functions given by her or functions at which she was to be present, it was long before I suspected purpose in all this. But, Julie, though modest I am not a fool. Things have now reached such a point that I cannot take a walk in the park or motor anywhere without meeting Irene. And I tell you there is evil design in all this, and I’m going away.” Julie was giggling increasingly. “Only five minutes ago I evaded her—but not for long. My senses are growing as abnormally acute as those of Roderick Usher in Poe’s story.” He paused and listened apprehensively. “And, in his words, ‘I tell you that she now stands without the door!’ ”

“You see? Good-bye, Julie! I’m going out the back way,” he concluded, and fled.

As for Julie, she threw herself down on the davenport and laughed helplessly, in which position Irene presently found her.

No one seeing Stacey with his sister could have reconciled him with the Stacey who set himself against society and flew into passions at his impotence to destroy. Yet there was no pose in his attitude toward her. Pose demands a marked consciousness of self, and this he was assuredly without. He behaved in that way because he felt that way when he was with Julie, which was not so very often; and he was obscurely grateful to her for making him feel so. He liked his sister better than in the old days. She had an ingenuous manner that concealed a rich sense of humor, and he was inclined to think that this was characteristic of her attitude toward all things, that, though her surface simplicity was unassumed, beneath it lay, not indeed a deliberate philosophy, but a mature apprehension of life. But he did not waste much thought on analysis of Julie; he accepted her as a pleasant fact.

Stacey, then, set off for New York the next afternoon. Julie was at the train to bid him good-bye, and so was Jimmy Prout, who tossed a book into his brother-in-law’s lap, and sat down opposite him. Stacey considered Jimmy’s agreeable face. Jimmy did no one any harm; on the contrary, he did people good by being such a companionable person. Why, thought Stacey, couldn’t he be like Jimmy? If turbulence of mind solved anything, got one anywhere, there would be something to say for it; since it didn’t, since it led only to impotent fuming, what was the use of it? But, even at the moment of putting the question to himself, Stacey was disconsolately aware that he might as well ask what was the use of the tides, since they only moved back and forth.

“You know, Stacey,” Julie was saying, “I’m over thirty, but every time I see any one off on the train I feel thirteen. I feel a positively aching desire to go too.”

“Come on along,” he returned. “Nobody I’d like better to have with me.”

“That’s nice of you, Stacey,” she said gratefully. “I would. I’d come just this way, without a thing, if it weren’t for Junior—he’s having whooping-cough. I’ve always wanted to do something impetuous like that.”

But Julie, who was sitting next the window of her brother’s section, suddenly gasped and burst into laughter. “Oh, Jimmy, Stacey, please, please, help me stop!” she cried, in a smothered voice, pressing her handkerchief against her mouth. “Oh, she mustn’t see me in this state!”

“I-Irene Loeffler. She—she’s come to see Stacey off,” Julie stammered weakly. “She’ll be in the car in a moment. Oh, dear!”

Jimmy laughed, too, and Julie made a tremendous effort at self-control, as Irene strode briskly down the car and paused beside them. She held a book in her hand.

Irene dropped into the seat beside Jimmy and crossed her legs. “I was looking for Effie Prince,” she remarked casually. “Supposed to be leaving on this train. Most likely couldn’t get her trunks packed in time. Never can. Here! You take the book I brought for her.”

“Thanks,” said Stacey. “Then you’re not going away? Sorry! I hoped you were when I saw you.”

The girl flushed faintly at this, but her embarrassment was covered by Julie, who gave a desperate choking cough.

“Here!” said her husband gravely. “Take another pastille, Julie,” and he drew a box from his pocket. “It’s that kid of ours,” he explained. “Given her whooping-cough—not a doubt of it. You’ll both have it now, probably.”

But the conductor was calling “All Aboard,” and the three departed hastily, Irene giving Stacey a mannish grip of the hand.

Stacey waved at them through the window, then stretched out in his seat and picked up Irene’s book. He laughed suddenly. It was “Les Chansons de Bilitis.”

But it was not a prelude to an amusing trip. Stacey wandered from city to city drearily. Except for being larger, they were no worse than Vernon; if they had been, they might have seemed less unbearable. They were merely empty—one after the other; empty places inhabited by empty people. New York sickened him. It wallowed in wealth, dazzled the eyes with it; rugs, imported motor cars, china, lights, theatres, food, more food,—there was an absorbed attempt to minister to every demand of the most exacting body, with, so far as Stacey could see, not a thought behind it all. The “Follies” were typical—gorgeous color, selected girls, riot of noise—not a word spoken that could reach beyond the intelligence of a sub-normal child. Stacey yawned through the show, to the justifiable annoyance of his companion, an old college friend, who had paid God knew what for the tickets. A hundred magazines stared at Stacey from the subway book-stalls, with a hundred pictures of sweet American girls on their covers, and who could tell how many hundred stories of thwarted Bolshevik plots among the advertisements inside?

Stacey fled to Philadelphia, thence to Baltimore, then up to Boston. He went to dinners and dances and dinner-dances in one place and another. Débutantes a little nakeder and bolder than he remembered them in past years. Quite in keeping with everything else. The whole country singing one vast jazz song of praise to the body, sole preoccupation how to gratify every instinct it possessed. It was callousness carried further than was credible, since across the ocean were thousands who, too, were thinking only about their bodies—perforce, being unable to get sufficient food and clothes to keep them alive.

He gazed at it all with bitter aloofness. What could he do about it? What could any one do about a world like this? There was a desolate emptiness in his heart that inhibited even rage. He longed for annihilation, the absolute eternal extinction of self. He had certainly altered in these last months. Even he, who tried not to think of himself, could not help perceiving this. His reactions were more jerky, disconnected with any former reactions, incoherent. He was not a strong scornful soul, detached and looking at everything in one manner; he was a series of sterile unrelated emotions, with the only continuous theme that ran through them all, disgust.

He gave it up at last and returned to Vernon—why, he could not have explained. He wrote no one that he was coming.

It was a morning in early December when he got back. Snow was thick on the city. The taxi that Stacey hired splashed through slush in the centre of town and slewed madly, despite its chains, on the boulevard leading to the Carroll house.

Stacey flung himself on the couch in his study and presently fell asleep. He did not wake until Parker knocked at the door to call him to luncheon. Two hours of unconsciousness. Well, that was so much gained, anyway.

He spent as many hours of the afternoon as he could in bathing and dressing, then at last left the house and tramped away through the snow. He had no objective in mind, but after a while, finding himself near Philip Blair’s house, went up the steps to it and rang the bell.

Catherine opened the door. At first he thought that she looked wan and tired; but she smiled with pleasure at sight of him, and the impression vanished.

“I’m awfully glad you’re back, Stacey,” she said. “Phil was saying last night that it seemed years you’d been away. Come in. Marian—Mrs. Price—is here.”

He felt the faintest touch of surprise,—no more, for he was almost done with correlating facts. His mind no longer worked that way. He was rapidly growing unable to see people in relation to one another, and so to find one relation natural, another curious. Unity was beginning to desert his impressions. Each of them seemed to come separately.

Thus he was scarcely at all surprised when, at sight of Marian, whom he had nearly forgotten, his old passion for her leaped up like sudden flame. He shook her hand, with a word or two of casual greeting, but his eyes met hers electrically. He made no effort to combat the sensation. If anything, he was grateful for it. And the antagonism, as strong as the attraction, that formerly she had aroused in him, was absent, since he was living in the isolated moment.

Marian was lovely, he thought, sick with an unrecognized desire for loveliness. She wore a toque of white fur that fitted close to her small head, and there were white furs over her shoulders. She was a little thinner than before her marriage, and her delicate features were as clear and fine as those of a silver goddess on some Syracusan coin.

“Well, where have you been this time, Stacey?” Marian asked gaily. “Fighting more dragons? Doing dozens of herculean tasks—Augean stables, hydras, taking Atlas’ place for a time?” She gave him a malicious smile.

Clearly Marian was as hostile as ever. No matter! On the contrary, he was instinctively glad of her hostility. It revealed warmth.

Oddly enough, it was Catherine who flushed at it. Stacey noted the flush with surprise. Oh, well, everything was odd! There was no use in trying to clear it up. It was also incomprehensible that, feeling as he was feeling toward Marian, he should not impatiently desire to have Catherine go away and leave them together. Yet he desired nothing of the sort.

“No,” he replied peaceably to Marian, “I’ve merely been boring myself to extinction in a stupid world. Any time that Atlas wants to let the sky fall on it he may, so far as I’m concerned. But,” he added, “it’s gratifying to have you make all your metaphors Greek, Marian.”

She bit her lip at this, and her eyes shone dangerously for an instant. But presently she smiled again.

“Not very brilliant, I’m afraid,” she said, a trifle wearily. “We’ve all got colds—all except Carter, who’s still at school now. I’ve got a cold, Phil’s got a bad cold, and Jackie’s got a horrid cold.”

“Upstairs. You can hear him cough regularly every thirty-two seconds. I timed him last night.” She made a brave attempt to pass it off lightly. But Stacey perceived that she was worn out, and felt sorry for her.

“Can’t I go up and sit with him and let you rest?” he asked. He was quite sincere in the demand, too; which was as strange as everything else, since his passion for Marian was bubbling in his veins like a Circean draft.

“No—thank you,” said Catherine, with a rare beautiful smile. “He’s asleep now. I’ll go up when he wakes. I’m afraid,” she went on, with involuntary formality, and turning to Marian, “that I don’t seem very cordial. Really I’m glad you came—both of you.”

“Truly?” asked Marian prettily. “Then I’ll stay a few minutes longer. I was afraid I might be tiring you.”

Stacey considered her. He felt that she was hard beneath her beauty. She was not pitiful. She was not interested in sickness. It annoyed her. Yet this judgment made not the slightest difference in what he was feeling toward her. The only thing that affected him was his perception that she was somehow tense, and that she was staying for him. This stirred him.

A strange trio—even Stacey could feel that; yet they managed to talk with apparent ease—of Vernon, New York, the weather,—anything. What a thing training was!

But a small pathetic whine came from upstairs. Catherine rose hastily. “It’s Jackie,” she explained. “You’ll excuse me for a few minutes, won’t you?”

“No, please! I’ll give him his medicine and get him to sleep again and be back down presently.”

Neither Stacey nor Marian moved, but their eyes met instantly. They gazed at each other in silence. Stacey’s heart beat heavily; he could feel the throb of it chokingly in his throat. Marian’s eyes were inscrutable, but her lips were shut closely in an expression of sullen anger.

She did not reply, but her fine nostrils dilated slightly. There was another moment of silence.

“No!” The monosyllable seemed to spring forth without her volition. “You know I’m not, Stacey Carroll,” she added presently, with concentrated bitterness. “Why do you want to insult me?”

They were, in some strange, partial, imperfect manner, made for each other; for they caught each other’s emotions unerringly. The hostility went out of Marian’s face.

“I couldn’t have believed,” she said, after a moment, “that any one could be so unbearably stupid as Ames is, hour after hour, day after day.” Hatred flared up again in her eyes—but not hatred of Stacey this time, he knew. “And—brutal!” she added, between her teeth.

Stacey could follow her thoughts as clearly as though they had been small distorted goblins leaping up and vanishing in the air. The cult of her body,—Marian had always had it, refined upon it fastidiously. Not at all vain, she had been aloofly physically proud. What she had felt for her own body was precisely what her father felt for his Chinese vases. And now she had had to turn this one cherished possession over to a new and despised master. Stacey caught it all, not through such analysis, but in a swift intuitive glimpse. He writhed. “It’s all your fault, yours!” her eyes seemed to say to him. He sprang up.

But she had risen, too, and her arms were about his neck almost as soon as his own encircled her. She lifted her lips to his with a long tremulous sigh. A flood of passion submerged them. When he released her she tottered, shaking, and clung to the back of the chair. He had never seen her so moved—he could think this even while his own heart bounded. Her face was glowing, transfigured and beautiful—oh, beautiful!

He nodded, dizzily, holding her hands so tight that he must have hurt them cruelly.

He was reckless. Nothing, not the faintest bond, held him back. He wanted Marian and would have her. As for Ames’s absence from home, it was negligible. He did not care a rap that Ames was away, either on his own account or because of Marian’s reputation; or for any other reason. He would follow this instinct, this desire. But the truth about Stacey is deeper. He would now have followed equally any desire—a desire to commit murder, for example.

He gazed at the girl, then slowly drew her to him again, but more gently this time, till his cheek pressed her hot cheek and his nostrils inhaled the fragrance of her curly hair.

And at that moment Catherine did come in. She started. Her hand went to her heart. Then she stood there in the doorway, silent, motionless, not accusing, only like a somber intruder on a tragedy. It is astounding, but the truth, that even at such a moment Stacey could receive from Catherine an impression of something fate-like, goddess-like, more than human, a sense of bigness. Again the unrelated character of his impressions.

But Marian, who had torn herself away from Stacey, gasped, then gave a little hysterical laugh, and fled from the house without a word, gathering her trailing white fur swiftly about her throat.

Stacey was unmoved, except in the way the subsiding sea is moved when a storm is past. He stood looking squarely at Catherine, a twisted ironical smile on his lips, his eyes cool and challenging.

Catherine sank down in the chair where Marian had sat, and leaned forward, folding her hands above her knees. Her dark eyes did not leave his. He saw that for the first time in their relationship all shyness had slipped from her. There was something magnificent about her, he thought, now that he really saw her unveiled.

“Why not?” he asked, with polite detachment. “Sanctity of the marriage relation?” She shook her head. “What then? Moral discipline of self-denial? Regard for Ames Price—Vernon’s third-best golf player? Or concern for Marian? You needn’t worry about Marian. She’ll never feel remorse, and no more shall I. Come, Catherine, you’re not communicative!”

“You—you know I can’t talk readily,” she said. “But, oh, Stacey, don’t! please don’t! I’m not speaking to you with reasons—only from my heart.”

“No,” he returned grimly, “you’re speaking with all the massed tradition heaped up under the impression that through it some purpose can be followed. All a mistake, I tell you!”

“No! No!” she cried, her grave face alight with expression. “I’m not!” Suddenly her eyes grew pitiful. “Oh, Stacey,” she said, “you poor hurt child! Do you want to hurt yourself more?”

At this his calm was shaken. A dull resentment stirred in him,—but not because he was vain, or even proud.

“I suppose,” he said slowly, “that because I—some one else that I used to be—felt in such and such a way about Marian, you would not have me trample on those old illusions, for fear of pain. Catherine, I do not give that for my illusions!”

“Oh, nor I, either, Stacey! ‘Don’t’ is all I can say. In your heart you know I’m right.”

But she nodded her head. “You do,” she repeated. “Ah, dear Stacey, think! You’re hard and bitter—or you think you are—really you’re only hurt”—(he winced)—“but the one impulse you have is to look at things squarely, and to be one who can look at them so. Will you, then, do—do—crooked things, have a secret back-stairs liaison, hide behind—corners, meet Marian in the dark, with whispers? Oh, you mustn’t!”

The thrust went deep. He walked up and down the room restlessly, his heart full of anger and pain. Finally he turned on her.

“I’ll do what I please!” he cried. “Who are you to preach to me like this? What are you in my life? Nothing!”

But at this she started, then buried her head in her hands and wept. And when he saw that he had hurt her, as he had intended, he was shocked.

However, she lifted her head, unashamed, almost at once. “Forgive me!” she said simply. “Who am I? Who are we? We—Phil and I—love you. That’s the only power we have over you.”

He gazed at her for a moment, helplessly and remorsefully. “I’ll do as you say,” he said dully. But, with his surrender, anger rushed upon him again furiously. “Only,” he added, trembling with rage, “I’ll tell you that you and Phil are impossible! You’re too good! Abominably good! It’s sickening! Leave me alone now, both of you!”

CHAPTER XV

Stacey plunged blindly down the hill, in an insane fury of rage and thwarted passion. His mind was a hot swirling confusion which he made no attempt to clarify. But in the welter two things remained firm—his will to go to Marian’s house to-night, his will not to go. These were two equal warring forces. Their conflict churned up anger—anger with Catherine, anger with himself for having inexplicably yielded to Catherine.

Under foot were wet snow and ice. Stacey slipped again and again. But he tore on, as though there were some definite place he must get to, though, indeed, had he been capable of reflection, he would have perceived the reverse to be true.

He reached the boulevard and turned into it, ploughing along at a tremendous pace in the direction of his home. But presently some small capacity for thought did return to him, and he became aware that he most certainly did not want to go home. He began to walk less rapidly, and at last stopped altogether, bewildered, and looked about him, not knowing what to do.

It was only five o’clock, but the early winter dusk was already darkening the air, and lights were beginning to shine out in the windows of houses. Stacey stood beneath one of the brilliant clusters of electric globes with which the city government had adorned the boulevard, and stared in front of him. But he was not really reflecting; his mind was simply at a deadlock between the two opposing forces that usurped it. Some new factor, however slight, must intervene before he could act.

The factor revealed itself externally as a high-powered racing car, which drew up, throbbing, at the curb, with a grinding of suddenly applied brakes and a spatter of slush.

“Hello, Carroll!” called the young man who was driving it. “Pretty nasty under foot. Can I give you a lift?” He reached over and flung open the door of the car.

Stacey looked up, with a start. His mind cleared swiftly. The pause before he was able to reply was hardly perceptible. “Oh, hello, Whittaker!” he said, in quite a natural voice. “Thanks.” He rested one foot on the step of the car and frowned. “The only thing is that I don’t know where I want to go. I was just trying to make up my mind.”

The young man at the wheel laughed. He was a big fellow, appearing still bigger because of the enormous fur coat he wore, and had a ruddy face, with pleasant eyes and a hard mouth. He looked like a commercial traveller come into a fortune. “Well,” he said, “that does make it a bit difficult, don’t it? Anyhow, hop in! You certainly don’t want to stick around where you are.”

Stacey obeyed, slamming the door after him, and sat down beside Whittaker, who started the car off slowly along the boulevard.

The young man was of the type known in current slang as “hard boiled.” This quality, however, was not the result of his service in France—he had been a lieutenant of infantry in a different division from Stacey’s. The war had not had the slightest effect on Whittaker. He had always been “hard boiled,” even before the term existed.

“I don’t want to go home,” Stacey explained. “Fed up with home. Where you going? Can’t you take me along?”

The other laughed again. “Sure! I can, but you wouldn’t go. Too much of a high-minded puritan. Why, you wouldn’t even end up that dinner we had in Paris in any decent way! I’m going out to Bell’s at Clarefield for the night.”

“Well, well, the sky has fallen! My last illusion’s gone! War, thy name is corruption!” Whittaker exclaimed. “Sure! Glad to have you!” he added genially. “Now let’s figure it out. I’ve got a little girl I’m going to take along. We can squeeze you in all right—all the cosier, what? But you’d better go and dig up some one yourself and get your car.”

Stacey shook his head. “No, I’ll ride with you—if I won’t be butting in. Maybe I’ll find some one out there.”

“Maybe,” the other returned dubiously. “But everybody will be pretty much paired off.”

“Drive around to my house and we’ll have a drink while I get a few things together.”

In Stacey’s mind the will to have Marian, the will not to have her, and the anger persisted, but underneath. Above, as the active part, was the matter of this trivial escapade. His dissent from Whittaker’s suggestion that he get his own car and bring another young lady was not due to distaste—nothing so fastidious as that could get a hearing now—but to Stacey’s positive fear of being left alone. If he were left to himself, nothing, as night fell and his longing deepened, could prevent his going to Marian. He must be prevented.

“Parker,” he said to the man who took Whittaker’s snowy fur coat in the hall, “I’m going away again for a day or two. You’ll tell Mr. Carroll when he gets in. First, please get us some whiskey and a siphon—Scotch, Whittaker?”

“And then kindly pack that very small bag of mine with things for the night.”

But when Parker had brought the drinks to the library he came up close to Stacey. “Excuse me, sir,” he said in a low tone. “There’s a young lady who’s called to see you.”

Stacey opened his eyes wide, but he rose immediately. “Just a minute, Whittaker,” he remarked. “Be back at once. Pour yourself a drink.”

The man looked perturbed. “She wouldn’t give me her name, sir, and that’s why I thought I’d better speak to you quietly.”

But it was not a book agent. It was Irene Loeffler. She stood waiting, an expression of mingled fear and determination on her face, across which the color came and went oddly.

“Hello!” said Stacey brusquely. “What are you doing here?” He did not offer to shake hands; nor did she.

The girl looked at him. She swallowed nervously. He could see the movement of her throat.

“I’ll—tell you,” she replied desperately. “I came to see—you, because you won’t come to see me. I—I don’t believe in silly old conventions. You—you’d come to me if you—were fond-of-me” (she blurted out the three words in one terrified syllable), “so I—come to you.”

Any one half-way normal would have laughed outright. Irene was so absurdly out of harmony with her speech. She was as shrinking and virginal as her words were shameless.

But Stacey was beyond humor. He was living in a state of nervous exasperation bordering on madness. “Oh, I see!” he said icily. “A declaration!”

Her face flamed. “You can be insulting if you want to!” she cried, with a sudden angry sincerity. Then she went on with her speech. “And when I came and—asked for you, your man—told me you were just—going away again—in a few minutes. And I thought—that is, I decided—I mean, take me with you!”

He stared at her in amazement and for an instant did feel a small flicker of amusement. The young woman’s polite offer chimed in so well with Whittaker’s suggestion that they needed another girl.

“That’s very kind of you,” he said coolly, “but I don’t think you’d like the place. I’m going out to Bell’s Tavern at Clarefield. It’s a bit rough there and not well thought of in Vernon society. Greatly as I should enjoy your companionship, I fear you’d find yourself rather disapproved of in the best Bolshevik circles on your return.”

She winced under his words and flushed crimson, but she faced him, not unheroically. “You’re hateful!” she cried. “But I—I’ll go—if you’ll take me!”

All the exasperation that he was feeling within him burst loose suddenly upon poor Irene, who had nothing to do with causing it.

“You little fool!” Stacey said savagely, “even the idiots in your club have got more sense than you! They don’t know anything about facts, and you don’t, either. But they know enough to let them alone. You go home and play with your theories and don’t mix them up with facts any more. If I had so much as a shadow of a fancy for you I’d take you with me. But I haven’t—luckily for you! I don’t care two beans about you! Now run along home.”

But, with the air of his mind cleared by this explosion, and when he saw how the girl had collapsed under his brutality, he felt suddenly sorry for her, and sick and tired.

“Look here, Irene!” he said, taking her arm. “I didn’t mean all that. Only, honestly, you don’t care anything for me. You’ve just built up an imaginary me and lavish an imaginary love on him. Forgive me for being so rough.”

What he said this time was true beyond a doubt, though Irene could hardly be expected to believe it. For when he took her arm she did not draw close to him in delight; she shrank instinctively from his touch. She was sobbing, but he was probably quite right in thinking that it was from anger and shame. She controlled herself presently and wiped her eyes.

He went to the door with her. “Good night, Irene,” he said cordially, shaking her hand.

“Oh, that’s all right!” he replied, with a touch of amusement. “Good night.”

“No harm in that,” the other returned genially, “so long as you leave me in such good company.” He waved his hand toward the carafe.

They set off presently, Stacey giving a sigh of relief at being out of the house and in some one else’s hands—no longer obliged to think for himself.

It was quite dark now. The car ploughed through the freezing slush and mud of a suburban district until at last it drew up before a small outlying drug-store.

Whittaker blew the horn, and a girl scurried out into the green and purple light, and down to the curb.

“Uh-huh,” Whittaker assented. “My friend, Stacey Carroll, Minnie. Another hero of the late world unpleasantness. Minnie Prentice, Carroll. Hop in, Minnie, old thing!”

Stacey had stepped down to let the girl in. She shook his hand and turned her small piquant face to his for a moment, then sprang up lightly, dropping a kiss on Whittaker’s cheek, running her arm through his, and snuggling into place, all in a second.

“Minnie,” Whittaker remarked, as the car leaped forward, “was lately a prominent, if silent, member of that unfortunate production, ‘The Pearl Girl,’ which expensive show completely failed to arouse Chicago from its sleep, and passed away, with me finally almost the only mourner. Disgusted with the rouge and corruption of the stage, Minnie decided to reform; and where, as I explained to her, can you reform better than in Vernon? in which pleasant city she now holds a position at Leveredge’s department store (notion counter), and has me for a chaperon. Hey, Minnie?”

“You forget to tell Mr. What’s-his-name the rest, Bill,” said Minnie with dignity.

“Mr. Carroll, sweetness, Carroll! The Vernon Carrolls! So I do,” Whittaker rattled on, meanwhile driving the car consummately over a slippery expanse of ice. “Having a sweet pure voice, Minnie is on the very verge of being admitted to the First Presbyterian Church choir. Hence the obscure situation of our meeting-place. For, strange as it may seem, the First Presbyterian Church would not approve of my respectful appreciation of Minnie. Evil minds church people have!”

The young woman giggled. “My, but you’re silly, Bill! I’ll say you are!” she observed. “What’ll Mr.—er—Carroll—got it that time, didn’t I?—think of me?”

“Oh, don’t you worry about that!” Whittaker replied. “He won’t think of you at all. He’s got a secret sorrow.”

The girl turned her face toward Stacey. “That so, Mr. Carroll? You got a secret sorrow?” she inquired. “What’s she like?”

Stacey laughed. He was not diverted by such patter, but he was soothed by it; it was precisely what he needed to tide him over these hours. “Blonde,” he returned. “As blonde as you are. At least, as blonde as I think you are from your voice. From what I’ve seen of you so far your coloring appeared to be mixed green and purple.”

“Come on, sweetness!” Whittaker urged. “Coax the little mind along! Teach it to walk! Don’t be afraid, little pet! Toddle over to daddy!”

“Oh,” exclaimed the girl, “I get you! The lights there at that drug-store.”

“That’s it! That’s it! Why, the little darling took three whole steps by its own self!” Whittaker said admiringly. “Colossal mind Minnie has!” he added to Stacey. “Too big to work! Too big to move! Just lies still and pants!”

“Oh, you shut your face, Bill! I guess my mind’s as good as yours any time. You care a lot about it, anyway, like hell you do! I’ll tell you what you care about.” And she whispered, giggling, into his ear.

But presently the car swung into a wide road, where the snow, well packed and sanded, had not been torn into icy slush by city drays; and here Whittaker increased the speed. The hum of the engine became a smooth rhythmic thunder, the cleft air roared past, and any further talk was impossible.

Stacey was thrown back on his thoughts. They became the reality, the actual present only a shadow. He was but vaguely conscious of his surroundings—the cold flowing air, the car’s headlights on the snow, Whittaker, the girl’s warm body next him. The memory of Marian was more vivid than all these things. Soon now she would be expecting him at her house, and he would not be there. He writhed. And what would she think of him? She must hate him. Until to-day he had not cared what she felt toward him. But now it was different. He and she had been honest with each other to-day. Fancies gone, illusions gone, everything false and pretty stripped off, their two small remaining selves had met for the first time in harmony, each no longer asking anything that the other could not give, but demanding the possible fiercely. He had no right to break off in this way. So Stacey thought dizzily, anger with Catherine and himself returning at intervals, as a variation on the theme.

He came back wearily to the present, as the lights of Clarefield flashed up and the car swept over the curved driveway leading to the gleaming road-house. He stepped, shivering with cold, from the car, and helped the girl out. They waited on the hotel verandah while Whittaker drove the car back to the garage.

“H-how about-t it now, Mr. C-Carroll?” she demanded gaily, her teeth chattering. “Am I still p-purple and green?”

He forced as much interest as he could, and looked her over. “No,” he answered, “you’re—well, no matter! Only I shouldn’t worry about a mind, if I were you. You don’t need one.”

She really was pretty, he saw with indifference. Bad mouth, though, he noted, with an equal lack of interest. Loose and stupid.

The girl returned his scrutiny. “You’re not so worse, either,” she said, considering him with sophisticated sensual eyes.

Whittaker returned. “God! but it’s cold! Let’s run for drinks. Thank the Lord, the bar here is still wide open!”

They went in. A large room on the right was already half full of people dining and dancing. Whittaker paused for a moment to reserve a table, then the three hurried off to the bar. It occurred to Stacey that he had better slip away from Minnie and Whittaker after a little. He had no right to spoil their evening. Nice sort of companion they must be finding him! But Whittaker, with the geniality of his sort, seemed to find no fault in his guest, while, as for Minnie, she would clearly be benevolently uncritical of any man under forty, not bad looking, who would drink. Moreover, something soon happened to make Stacey change his mind.

Glancing across the room to another alcoved space opposite, he caught sight, over a woman’s shoulder, of a face he thought he recognized, started, half rose to make sure, then sank down again in his chair and burst into unforced laughter.

“No, is he really?” exclaimed Whittaker. “Well, I say, it is a bit soon, isn’t it?” And he, too, rose to look, and laughed, though the real joke was lost on him. “Stewed, too! Stewed to the gills!” he added.

Stacey got up. “Excuse me a minute,” he said. “I’ll go over and worry him.”

Stacey crossed the room slowly. His mouth still twitched with amusement, but the expression thus given his face was malignant rather than mirthful. No, he was certainly not at his best when he smiled. He paused near the alcoved recess and stood gazing maliciously at Ames Price, whose back was toward him, and at the tall handsome young woman sitting across the table from Ames. She was slender and dark, with large eyes and a rather fine, weary mouth. She looked bored by her escort, and returned Stacey’s stare with cool interest. Then he touched Ames on the shoulder.

The man looked around slowly, but when he saw Stacey his mouth fell open, a slow flush spread over his smooth face and bald forehead, an apprehensive look came into his eyes, and he rose quickly, swaying a little.

“Me?” Stacey returned. “Why shouldn’t I be here? I’m a free man, unbound, no ties at all, you know.”

Price clung to his arm and pulled him away to the edge of another booth, out of hearing of the young woman.

“ ’Sh’unfortunate!” he said hoarsely, struggling with his intoxication. “I mean to shay—say—you of all people!” He drew out a handkerchief and wiped his forehead. “Look here, Shta—no, Carroll—you don’t mind if I call you Carroll? ’S’ easier to say than Shta—your other name. No lack of inti—intima—cy intended. Look here, Carroll! Now I’m drunk, of course! You can see that! Anybody can see that! Whole world can see that! Hell! that isn’t what I was trying to say.” He paused again, made an even greater effort at self-mastery, and really did achieve some moderate success. The expression of concern in his glazed eyes deepened. “Damn it all! You wonder what I’m doing here! Now don’t you?”

“Why, no,” said Stacey, enjoying himself evilly. “I saw you here and just dropped over to say hello.”

Ames reached for a carafe that stood among glasses on a table near-by, poured a tumblerful of water with a shaking hand, and drank. Then he shook his head solemnly. “No, you wonder. Of course you wonder.”

Stacey watched him critically. “Doing pretty well,” he thought. But beneath Stacey’s surface calm was hatred. So this—this sweating, panting, bald-headed animal—owned Marian, did he?

“Damn it all, Stacey!” Ames whispered raucously, leaning close to his tormentor, “I can’t help it! Marian’s so God-damned cold! ’S’no place to talk about her—I’ve got sense enough left to know that. But got to explain myself to you—you of all people! Cold, that’s what she is,—ice! Freezes a man. Honest to God she does! Looks-a fellow ’s’though he was dirt—yes, tha’s it, dirt! Locks her door. ’S’why I come here. Let her treat me like a man—I’d be best of husbands—none better.”

“Sorry to hear this,” Stacey returned smoothly. “Wished you both all sorts of happiness. But you don’t owe me any explanations. Besides, this is a place for light-hearted gaiety. Shame to spoil it with dull thoughts of home. I’m out here with Bill Whittaker and his young lady. Thought perhaps, when I saw you, we might all arrange to dine together in one large genial party. How about it?”

Ames stared at him, his face clearing slowly. “Why, sure!” he said at last, heaving a sigh. “Thought at first you’d—oh, never mind now! what? Come on over and meet Ethel.”

“No, not cold. Not warm or cold,” said Ames judicially, “but friendly. Good sort, Ethel!” He drew Stacey back to the alcove. “Ethel, ’s Stacey Carroll. Wants us to dine with him an’ some other people. First-rate, what?”

Stacey bowed, and the girl looked at him appraisingly. She was really very handsome, he saw now, with an enigmatic quality in her face, caused perhaps by the fact that her black eyes were not quite horizontal, but slanted down ever so faintly toward the bridge of her nose.

“Well, I’ll tell you,” Stacey remarked. “I’ll go back and arrange with Whittaker about it. See you both in a few minutes.” And he crossed the room, smiling again.

“Beautiful plan I’ve evolved, Whittaker,” he said, sitting down and sipping the cocktail that was waiting for him. “Ames is drunk, as you observed. Got over it a bit in talking with me, but will grow drunker presently. Very attractive girl with him—name of Ethel. I feel innocent sorrow for her. D’you mind if we all dine together? I propose to remove Ethel gently from Ames. Told you I’d find some one out here.”

Whittaker laughed. “Sure!” he said heartily. “That’s something like! We’ll help all we can, hey, Minnie?”

“Gee! Mr. Carroll, and I thought you was slow!” the girl exclaimed delightedly.

“My dear Minnie,” said Stacey, “of course you’ll find me slow. Here I am, Bill’s guest. I owe it to him to suppress all the evil desires you arouse in me. Besides, we’re Presbyterians in our family, have a pew in the church. I’d never feel the same again towards the choir if . . .” He finished his cocktail and gazed at her reproachfully over the glass, while she laughed.

They all three crossed the room to Ames, who presented them heavily to Ethel. He was no drunker than before, however,—perhaps even a little less drunk, and he entered the dining-room with dignified concentrated steadiness.

The table the head-waiter had reserved for Whittaker would only seat four comfortably. “I’m the outsider. I’ll sit here at the corner,” Stacey said firmly, and motioned the waiter to draw him up a chair close to Ethel’s. “You order, Whittaker, will you?”

The room was pandemonium, on account of the jazz band that was at one end and the cabaret performance that was everywhere. All conversations were necessarily shouted.

It occurred to Stacey that the age he lived in was devoted to noise, as a barbaric preventive of thought. No doubt it was right. What good had thought ever done the world? Here were the five of them, come out frankly in quest of food, drink, lights, noise, and sexual gratification. Nothing but animals, all five! Well, what of it? Clearly that was what the earth’s millions were all, in this glaring after-war illumination, revealed as seeking. The only difference among them was that some were more complicated and refined in their animalism than others. There wasn’t much complexity out here. So much the better! Strip off the last silken shreds of decoration! Leave the truth stark naked! The animal was all there was, and there was only so much, and no more, to the animal.

Thus Stacey mused, under cover of the hubbub, not perceiving that the fact of his musing denied its conclusion; not remarking that his own word was “quest”; not seeing that people were trying to be, and thus were not wholly, animals; certainly not seeing that this quest was as futile as any other.

How, indeed, could his thoughts fail to be superficial? They swam languidly on the surface waters of his mind. Beneath was a painful turmoil into which he struggled not to look.

He roused himself sharply, with a start, and looked around. Whittaker, on his right, was leaning over to Minnie just beyond, his face close to hers, his hand beneath the table. She was answering his glance and his words, her blue eyes dilated below the delicately darkened eyebrows, her loose mouth babbling or, between speeches, drooping sensually. Ames Price was concerned with nothing but the effort to control his intoxication. Stacey turned to the girl beside him.

Her pose was easy and graceful, and the curve of her cheek beneath the mass of her black hair was rather fine. Stacey felt the enigmatic quality about her even now when he could not see her slanting eyes. His knee touched hers, not intentionally but because they were sitting very close together, and she turned her face slowly toward his. Their eyes met. Hers were extraordinarily large and dark, and gazed into his, half curiously, half cynically, for a long moment. Strange eyes, unfathomable! Suddenly dull fire smoldered in them, and Stacey felt dizzy. He shivered,—but so did she; he felt her knee tremble against his. She smiled and lowered her eyes.

“I’ve heard of you, Mr. Carroll,” she observed calmly. “Every one in Vernon has, of course. I’d rather like to have been a man and fought as you’ve fought.”

“Would you, now?” he said then. “That’s odd! You look too properly disdainful to care about fighting, and, as to being a man, you seem to me very thoroughly a woman.”

“By the way,” he added abruptly, “what’s your name? Your drunken friend presented you merely as Ethel.”

“Wyatt. Ethel Wyatt. It wouldn’t mean anything to you. But I prefer Ames drunk, don’t you?”

She turned to Price. “Cheer up, Ames, old top!” she cried, in a jovial, quite different voice. “Cocktails! Here’s to you!” And she pushed his glass toward him.

Ames gave her a dazed smile, patted her hand heavily, and drank. “ ’S’a mistake!” he said. “Had one a minute ago. Oughtn’t to have any more. But mus’ drink with Essel—Ethel.” He beamed across at Stacey. “Told you so, Carroll. See her for yourself now. Friendly. Not warm or cold, but friendly.”

“No.” He stared at her fiercely. “Will you chuck Ames and run off somewhere with me?”

“Yes, later,” she replied coolly, “when he’s quite drunk. I don’t want a scene. I hate scenes.” And she turned back to Ames.

Throughout the whole dinner she paid no more attention to Stacey, talking instead, with smiles and a coarsened voice, to her escort. But, beneath the table, her ankle was curved about Stacey’s, and now and again he felt it tremble, and trembled, too. But no touch of emotion was in her voice.

He had begun this merely as a savage joke on Ames. He was physically stirred now and going on with it eagerly, in search of oblivion.

After a while, Ethel being in sprightly conversation with Ames, Whittaker leaned close to Stacey. “I say! what’s the matter?” he demanded. “Wake up and get busy, Carroll!”

“Oh,” said Stacey calmly, “that’s all right! It’s all arranged. We’re only waiting for Ames to get completely blind. Miss Wyatt doesn’t want a scene.”

Whittaker stared, then laughed. “My heartiest apologies!” he exclaimed. “You’re a cool pair!”

“Well,” said Whittaker thoughtfully, “you might go on to West Boyd. Fifteen miles straight down the road. There’s a good inn there, the Thorndike. Oh, but hang it, you haven’t got a car!”

Whittaker shook his head. “Take mine, old chap!” he said generously. “I don’t need it. I’ll telephone my man to bring out the other to-morrow morning.”

Whittaker nodded. “I’ll endorse it. They know me.” He laughed again. “What a lark!”

“Oh!” said Stacey suddenly, “one thing! Keep Minnie quiet! Don’t want to let Ethel know I had this planned before I met her.”

Before long Ames rose, staggering, his face livid. “ ’Scuse me,” he said thickly, “jus’ minute.”

“He’s going to be sick, I guess,” said Minnie delightedly, watching him lurch across the crowded room toward the door. “But, gee! Mr. Carroll, you—”

“He won’t be back, I think,” she observed calmly. “Not for a long time. They’ll find him on some floor after a while. So . . .” She turned to Stacey.

“So we’ll leave you,” he concluded for her. “Thanks awfully for the car, Whittaker. And remember what the dinner check comes to. I’ll split it with you later.”

“You will not! My surprise and joy at your behavior are reward enough. Come on! We’ll see you off.”

And presently, when Ethel had put on her wraps, and the car had been brought around, and the two suitcases put in, Whittaker and Minnie stood on the verandah to see the lovers depart.

“If I knew where Ames was I’d get his shoe and throw after you,” called Whittaker, as Stacey started the car.

CHAPTER XVI

The chill silent night was a relief to Stacey, and perhaps to the girl, after the heated promiscuity of the road-house. An aloof wintry moon shone coldly on the white fields and made the frozen ponds glitter.

Stacey and Ethel might have been husband and wife from their nonchalant indifference to conversation. They hardly spoke on the long ride; yet there was no constraint between them. Once he asked her if she was cold, and she said that she was not; and once she observed that there was a bad grade a little way ahead, and he noted idly to himself the absence of self-consciousness with which she admitted to knowing the road.

“I suppose,” he remarked, in a matter-of-fact tone, as they drew near West Boyd, “that I’d better register us as man and wife under some fancy name?”

The girl turned her head toward him slowly. “For my sake or your own?” she inquired coolly.

She entered the inn unconcernedly, except that she wrinkled her forehead and half closed her strange eyes in the sudden brightness, and she stood with equal unconcern by Stacey’s side while he registered and asked for a room. Yet even he, who was hardly at all curious about her, recognized that her calm was not the mere callousness of the prostitute. It was easy, not hard, and so it seemed to arise not from outer experience—however much experience she might have had—but from an inner indifference to facts. So, at any rate, Stacey thought; then thought no more about it.

When a bell-boy had accompanied them to their room and set down their bags and departed, closing the door upon them, she slipped out of her heavy coat and removed her hat gracefully. But then, at last, she turned slowly to Stacey, who had been standing, watching her. Still in silence, they gazed into each other’s eyes profoundly, as they had, two hours earlier, at dinner. The girl’s mouth trembled. Suddenly they kissed.

“You—you’re—brutal!” she stammered, much later, panting, her face convulsed in a savage ecstasy of delight.

They remained at the inn for five days. But though physically their relation was unrestrained, entire, frenzied, no faintest intimacy of any other kind grew up between them, unless it may be counted as intimacy that they were perfectly at ease with each other in their hours of bodily calm, and could walk together across the frozen fields, silent or nearly so, unembarrassed, each thinking his own thoughts. Ethel might almost swoon in Stacey’s embrace; a moment after, her dark eyes, that had been moist and dilated, would become as unfathomable as ever. And, as for him, he might, and did, serve passion recklessly until pleasure turned to pain; nothing would come of it all, nothing be left over, no emotion, not even a grateful memory of delight, not even disgust,—only emptiness. Never in soft moments of assuagement did tenderness start up in him or show in her.

They talked, of course. And they did not say sharp things or get on one another’s nerves. They were not enemies. They talked only of general subjects, dispassionately, objectively. Or, rather, all subjects, even ideas, became external when Stacey and Ethel spoke of them. Yet the girl talked well and intelligently. It was simply that she revealed no emotional interest in anything they discussed. She seemed as detached and indifferent as he. But this, though it made their association comfortable, was not a bond between them.

Only once did their two personalities become conscious of each other and touch and draw a spark. When this happened it was immediately apparent that, though Ethel and Stacey were not enemies, they were antagonists, facing one another warily.

It was on the last morning of their stay. The girl was lying motionless on the bed, in the pose of Manet’s “Olympe” and with much the same exotic appearance. Stacey was sprawling in a chintz-covered rocker. He was suffering from a kind of bleak despair; for he was reflecting that everything he had done was impotent to destroy his desire for Marian. This was unfair, he thought sullenly, since his desire for Marian, too, was purely physical. Why, then, should not this liaison suffice? So, when Ethel spoke to him he answered her curtly.

“Isn’t it time,” she observed, without moving, “that you asked me about my past life, how I reached this regrettable condition, and so forth?”

He looked up slowly and considered her. “No,” he said, “I’m not interested.”

She raised her eyebrows. “Dear me! Not at all? How disrespectful of conventions! Why? Because you despise me?”

“You know I don’t despise you,” he replied indifferently. “Moreover, you don’t care whether I do or not.”

She smiled a little at this. “I don’t think that in all these five days I’ve expressed any appreciation of you,” she went on coolly. “You’re really very satisfactory. Now that’s what marriage ought to be like. Two healthy animals taking all the sharp pleasure they can from one another and letting each other’s immortal souls alone. Silly that they should be immortal, isn’t it? Perhaps they’re not. I think they must be, though; they’re so completely solitary. Nobody can ever have made them, they’re so solitary. They must always have been,—like stars in the empty sky; and so they must always go on.”

“I was with the Colin Jeffries’ until recently,” she went on, in the same cool tone and not even troubling to explain her revelation. Indeed, it was not like a personal revelation. She seemed to Stacey to be merely meditating aloud—and about a third person. “With the Colin Jeffries’—as governess to their children.”

“An impossible house,” she continued imperturbably. “Mrs. Jeffries is the kind of woman who wants to dig into every one’s mind and pull out the weeds and plant it with proper vegetables—cabbages and such—in rows. And Mr. Jeffries is tiresomely lecherous. He was always trying to get into my bedroom. Once he hid in my bath.”

Stacey laughed. “I didn’t know that, of course,” he said, “but I might have guessed it. Any such public institution as Colin Jeffries must have to take it out privately somehow. I can see why you went away. Still I think you might have found something a little better than Ames Price.”

“Oh,” she explained simply, “I didn’t take him on at once. I had an idea that there might be something more interesting in a disorderly life than an orderly one. Silly, wasn’t it? One’s as dull as the other. Ames is really as good a solution as any. He is generous with money and unperturbing.”

Stacey frowned. “That reminds me,” he said. “We’ll have to go back to-day. I’m about at the end of my money and I have almost none in the bank.”

She expressed no surprise at this, even by a look, though she must have known that he was supposed to be rich. But a shadow of regret did cross her face. She gazed at him, and he at her.

He obeyed. His eyes caressed her slim form somberly. “Your body is as strange as your face!” he muttered.

They left the inn early on the afternoon of that day and drove back over the road that led to Clarefield and Vernon. They were as separate as ever mentally, but they talked rather more freely, and Stacey, though he felt neither love nor friendship for the girl, felt esteem for her because she existed proudly by herself. He would not have her bruised. He would defend her in a matter-of-fact way from trouble, as one might defend a stranger from physical attack.

So: “What are you going to do,” he demanded suddenly, “when you get back to Vernon?”

“Go to my apartment,” she returned. “The one Ames took for me. Ames will come back.” She smiled faintly. “Are you concerned lest you’ve ruined my prospects?”

All at once he laughed. “I was thinking what a marvellous judge of character Ames is,” he observed. “ ‘Not warm or cold, Ethel, but friendly!’ ”

The girl turned her head and looked at him strangely, but this time without smiling.

At Clarefield they drove up to Bell’s Tavern where their adventure had begun, intending to warm themselves before going on. They sat down in the booth where Ethel had sat with Ames Price on the night of Whittaker’s dinner. Stacey reflected moodily, while they waited for the drinks he ordered, that, though nearly a week had passed since that evening, nothing whatever had happened. He had succeeded in staying away from Marian, but he wanted her as much now as he had wanted her then. Five full days of this affair with Ethel had not added a fraction to what he felt and was at the beginning of it, or taken a fraction away. If time were to be set back, the interlude wiped out, and he were to find himself sitting again with Whittaker and Minnie, looking across at Ames drunk, nothing would be changed.

But he was awakened from this reverie by the desk-clerk, who came up and touched his arm.

“I thought so,” said the clerk. “I remember your cashing a check here last Saturday night. This telegram came for you two days ago. We didn’t know what to do about it, and so we just held it, thinking maybe you’d be back.”

“Thanks,” said Stacey, taking it. “Can’t imagine who’d address me here except Whittaker,” he observed to Ethel, as he tore open the yellow envelope, “and he’d have sent any message to West Boyd.”

Stacey pushed back his chair and got up quickly. “We’ll have to go—at once!” he said. “A friend of mine is ill—pneumonia.”

She rose. “Your face is pale,” she observed, as he reached for her coat, “You really do care about something, don’t you?”

“Drink your high-ball first—as quickly as you can,” he said, not unkindly.

He flung money on the table and hurried the girl out. “And the message is two days old!” he muttered, wondering dully who could have told Catherine he was at Clarefield.

He drove the car to Vernon at a tremendous speed, Ethel sitting silent by his side. He spoke but once, to ask her the address of her apartment.

But when they drew up in front of it and he had helped her out, he stood with her for just a moment on the sidewalk. For all that he was feeling anxiety for his friend so strongly as almost to wipe everything else from his mind, he nevertheless—and even, somehow, because of this—felt now at last a touch of human interest in Ethel.

“If you ever need anything at all—or want to see me for any reason, call me up at my house,” he said inadequately.

There was another car standing at the curb. “The doctor’s!” he thought, with sudden hope.

Stacey did not ring, but opened the door softly and walked into the living-room.

Catherine was sitting there, like some expressionless Byzantine Madonna, with Carter in her arms. He was sleeping, his flushed face and tousled yellow hair against her breast, his legs dangling limply from her lap. There was no one else in the room. Catherine looked up as Stacey entered, but she did not speak.

The shadowy expression on her face deepened until it was unmistakable pain and fatigue, but still she did not speak.

Stacey sat down suddenly and turned his head away. Tears did not come to his eyes, but he gasped, a choking feeling in his throat that made it hard for him to breathe.

“Poor me?!” he exclaimed, “oh! . . . I only got your telegram an hour ago.”

Stacey became aware of the sound of feet moving on the floor above. “Who’s—up there?” he inquired.

Catherine’s lip trembled. “People doing—the things that have to be done.”

They sat there in silence for a long time. At last the solemn professional people came down from upstairs and went out, bowing gravely to Catherine. Then Mrs. Latimer returned. She looked at Stacey, first in surprise, then compassionately.

“You’d better go now, Stacey,” Catherine said. “I shall be all right. Mrs. Latimer and I must put Carter to bed. Would you like to go up and—look at Phil?”

He stumbled up the stairs, went into Phil’s room, and stood there for some time, looking down at the peaceful emaciated face. Stacey was suffering acute pain and—worse than that—a deeper sense of desolation than he had yet felt. He had not dreamed that he cared so much for Phil. To have shown him so in some way! To have given something decent and human in return for Phil’s warm gentleness! The best that Stacey could do for comfort was to remember that the last time he had seen Phil he had shaken his hand at parting. Only that!

Stacey went downstairs finally and out of the house. He drove home, then sat down wearily to write a note to Whittaker thanking him for the car. He gave the note to Parker and told him to have the chauffeur take it, as soon as possible, with the car, to Whittaker’s house. He did not feel irony or bitterness or scorn of himself in doing these things. They were merely things that had to be done. He was through with proud hostility of spirit; he was beaten. But he did not say this to himself, either.

His father came home before very long. He was gentle with Stacey, asked him no questions, tried even to veil the look of apprehensiveness in his own eyes. And Stacey recognized his kindness, the sweetness of nature that lay beneath Mr. Carroll’s set firmness,—recognized all his father’s virtues, more clearly and justly than ever before. But it was as though he were recognizing the virtues of a convincing figure in a two-dimensioned movie play. The world of men had become a world of shadows to Stacey.

Catherine alone he felt as a real person—no doubt because she was suffering the same sorrow as he. He spent all the time with her that she would permit, and while the funeral service was being held in the sitting-room of the little house he sat with her and Carter upstairs in Phil’s old room. They were both silent, save when they spoke comfortingly to the frightened weeping boy. They could hear the grave accents of the clergyman’s voice downstairs.

“What are you going to do, Catherine?” he asked her one morning two or three days later. “Shall you go back to New York—to your sister’s?”

She shook her head. “No, I’ll stay here for now, I think,” she replied. “The house rent is paid for a long time ahead, and I don’t want to take the boys out of school.”

“No—thanks,” she answered simply. “I have plenty for now, and”—her eyes drooped wearily—“Phil carried—quite heavy insurance. Your father, too, asked me that,” she added. “He’s been awfully good.”

Catherine considered him sadly. “Stacey,” she said, “you look dreadfully ill.”

“I feel a bit fagged,” he admitted. “I’ve been thinking that towards spring I might go down to father’s place in North Carolina.”

“I know. You’d like to help me. But there’s nothing you can do, Stacey. That’s sad, but it’s so. It only—”

“Yes. Gives you an extra worry.” He gazed at her. “Odd,” he thought, “how strong you are! Stronger than Phil, stronger than I!” But he only said yes, that he would go.

His father greeted the suggestion almost joyfully. “The best thing possible!” he exclaimed. “There’s the house, standing empty—hardly been used six months in ten years. Saddle horse eating his head off in the stable—old Elijah perishing for want of conversation. I was down there for a couple of months two years ago, but it bored me. I haven’t cared for the place since your mother died.”

Stacey nodded. “I understand how you feel about it,” he said. And, indeed, he did for a moment receive a sudden poignant memory of their winter life down there when his mother had been alive and they had all been young and gay. The memory faded almost at once. “Then I might as well be off some day this week, sir,” he remarked.

“You’d better wait till after Christmas,” said his father. “Er—Julie’s rather counting on Christmas together.”

“Mind you have Elijah look after Duke’s feet,” Mr. Carroll added, in obvious haste to avoid the appearance of sentiment. “His hoofs were always brittle.”

So presently, Christmas over, Stacey departed. It was capitulation, but he did not care about that. The only thing that interested him—and this but idly—was that he should so crave to get away from men and women when men and women had become such intangible phantoms.

For the rest, there was only the heavy sense of Phil’s death and of Catherine bearing up under it bravely.

CHAPTER XVII

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.

“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.”

“Well, I got to look afteh Duke, suh, an’ then theah’s all that big place to see to.”

“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.

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 it was only 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.

CHAPTER XVIII

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 medieval condottiere. No one in Meldrun would have heard of condottieri, 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’s bad, Mistuh Stacey!”—had said “how he was goin’ to get Mistuh 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.”

The youngest child, a girl of six, was crying bitterly in her mother’s arms. “Mitzi, I want my Mitzi!” she sobbed monotonously.

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.

“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.

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.

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.

Stacey pulled himself together. “I should say we’d better get out of here,” he remarked.

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.

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.

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.”

“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.

“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.

CHAPTER XIX

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 I was going away when you came back, Stacey.”

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.

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.

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?”

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.”

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 Julie would grow 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.”

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.

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.

“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, it is a 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.

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.”

CHAPTER XX

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—”

“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!”

“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, “can you 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 and he loafs. 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.

“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.”

A few minutes later Stacey opened the door of Mr. Parkins’s private office. “Hello!” he remarked. “Can I come in?”

Mr. Parkins stared at him with a humorous smile. “Now what have you gone and done—reformed?”

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.”

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. “I am glad 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.

“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—”

“—Because it will be my only chance for a while. I’m going back to work with Parkins to-morrow.”

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—“different things—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.

“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!’ ”

“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 people are gossiping 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.”

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. He had loved her. Her alone!

After a while he came to the park. And there, sitting on the same bench from which she had called to him that afternoon when Stacey had broken his engagement to Marian, he found Mrs. Latimer. But now he saw her first and stood quite near to her for a full half-minute before she caught sight of him. Now, as then, she was poking holes in the gravel with the point of a parasol, but she did not seem the same, he thought; her pose was tired, and the droop of her shoulders. When she became aware of some one’s close presence and looked up he was shocked; she appeared so old and worn. Then her face flashed into glad recognition, and the impression lost its acuteness.

“Why, Stacey,” she exclaimed, “did you drop from the sky?” She moved over to make room for him on the bench, and he sat down.

“It’s just about a year ago—not quite,” he returned, “that I found you here in the same place. Only then you had to call me. This time it’s I who surprise you. I’m awfully glad to see you, Mrs. Latimer. I was coming to your house presently.”

She gazed at him with affectionate curiosity. And now her familiar smile and bearing, all her known quality, was as a lack of focus in a lens, blurring the objective; yet, even so, he still felt that she was somehow changed—older, less resilient.

She let it go at that, tactfully, and they talked of outside things,—of his life in Pickens, of Vernon, of how lovely the month was. About herself Mrs. Latimer said nothing at all, and this worried Stacey until it occurred to him that she had never talked of herself, save only, suddenly, on that one afternoon a year ago here in the park.

“You must come home with me now,” she observed after a while, “and I will give you tea.” And she got up, rather wearily.

Her drawing-room was just as he remembered it. The light gleamed in just the same way from the ivory wood-work and along the polished surfaces of the same exquisite vases. But the room seemed to Stacey like a deadened melody played on muted strings. It was a romantic room and it needed Marian—the old elfish Marian, slipping in and out lightly,—to vivify it. He looked around him dreamily.

Mrs. Latimer had sunk down on a divan and removed her hat slowly. Now she was leaning back and looking at Stacey, not so much curiously as wistfully.

“Thank you,” he replied, warmed by her affection and feeling soothed by the delicate hushed beauty of the room, which had no connection with the outside world. The maid brought in the tea things.

But the water had been boiling in the silver urn for some little time before Mrs. Latimer finally made the tea. It seemed to demand a conscious effort for her to lift her hand to the urn.

She started, so that some of the water spilled over upon the tray; for just a moment she gave him an odd pained look; then she turned about quickly and laid her head against the back of the divan. Her shoulders shook with sobs, and there was fatigue without relaxation in every line of her taut body.

Stacey was shocked. He had always thought of Mrs. Latimer as strong, cool, and too wise to be shaken by any tempest. He had no idea of what to do or say. Instinctively he desired to stand near her and comfort her, but he feared that this would only make things worse. So he sat silent and gazed at her pityingly.

After a while she looked up. “Forgive me!” she began; then at sight of his expression her mouth trembled and she cried again. But presently she regained control of herself and wiped her eyes. Then Stacey saw that she was an old woman with a weary tragic face.

She was silent for a moment. “It was only because you were kind, Stacey, and seemed to feel interest in me.”

She did not mean this as a reproof, he knew, but he was aware that it was a damning one. Her interest in him had always been immense and generous; what interest had he ever shown in her? He had taken her for granted.

“But—there are so many things one doesn’t say—one isn’t allowed. If I told the truth I should seem shameful, violating decency.” Her eyes were chilly now and questioning.

“Well, then,” she said suddenly, in a hard voice, “it’s my husband—or partly. Perhaps he finds me as faulty as I find him, but, oh, he’s finely greedy, finely futile, finely avaricious, finely sterile in every human sentiment! I could bear all those things—perhaps—but for his fineness in all of them. I can’t live with him any longer. I loathe him. What have I done with my life, Stacey? I look down on nothing but ruins. My only child does not love me, nor I her. What good to bear a child? What is such a life for? I’ve been tolerant too long. What’s it all about—life?”

His tone calmed her and she looked at him in a pathetic questioning manner, as though she, who had always been like a watchful mother to him, were now his child. He sincerely did not like to talk about himself; he would always have an almost fierce aloofness. But he would give Mrs. Latimer what he could—if there was anything to give.

“See!” he said. “Life is—life is a Medusa. Try to face it and it freezes you to stone. You must look at the—the mirrored reflection in yourself, in the shield of your own personality. Then you can see it, without horror, for the pitiful, snake-crowned, impotently ugly thing it is.” He paused, with an odd smile. “You even,” he added slowly, “can see a ravaged beauty in it.”

Mrs. Latimer stared at him in silence, but the tensity in her face had vanished, perhaps because she was surprised.

“No,” he said, “that’s as far as the analogy goes. There is no sword.”

She gazed at him with a gentle eager look, and he saw that he really had helped her—not probably through anything he had said, but by awakening her capacity for sympathetic interest in others, her deep altruism. It was of him she was thinking now—proudly, as though he were herself. And, much as he disliked to, he would have gone on and told her everything he knew about himself if she had asked it. But she seemed to divine the effort he had made, and asked him nothing further.

“Oh!” she cried after a moment, with a tremulous laugh. “Your tea, Stacey!”

But, having risen to draw a curtain at a window, Mrs. Latimer suddenly turned about. “Stacey, you must go now!” she exclaimed. “I have just seen my husband coming up the street. I couldn’t bear to have you here in the room with both of us after what I said. I exaggerated. It isn’t as bad as all that. I shall be all right.”

He held out his hand to say good-bye, but she leaned forward and kissed his cheek. “Thank you,” she said.

As he left the house Stacey met Mr. Latimer. He looked like a steel engraving of a gentleman.

CHAPTER XXI

Stacey threw himself into work with a cold vigor that had in it nothing of fad or impulse. He did not find, as he had feared he might, that he had forgotten much. Everything came back to him at once; it had all been there, tucked away, neglected, within him. Neither did he chafe at the long regular hours he kept, nor feel them burdensome. In the old days he had perhaps been a little lazy; it had been hard for him on arriving at the office not to waste time—over a newspaper or a book-catalogue or anything that presented itself—before actually beginning his work; he had crept into work as a swimmer into cold water. Now there was no indolence about him; the instant he sat down at his desk he turned his mind on the problems before him; and, swiftly, intelligently, with intense concentration, he was soon accomplishing twice as much as any other man in the office. Indeed, less from a desire to be always busy than from a kind of impatient thoroughness, dislike of slovenliness, he often spent hours on drawings that he might have turned over to draftsmen. But, though he was extremely interested in his work, there was no such zest in it for him as he had once felt. Formerly he had romanticized it, had seen it all as something glowing and fine. Now it was only rarely that he experienced a little lifting sense of loveliness. This was when loveliness was really there to perceive.

Mr. Parkins, who was something of a dreamer and himself inclined to waste time, was amazed. He had difficulty in supplying Stacey with enough to do.

“Look here!” he said, before Stacey had been back a month. “What the devil’s come over you? You’re insatiable! You turn the work out as though it were arithmetic.” And he smiled in his uncertain reflective way.

“So it is, nine-tenths of it,—as unemotional as arithmetic. Nothing but concentration needed most of the time. Restful. A mistake to use your soul when you don’t have to.”

The architect sat down on the edge of Stacey’s desk. “But,” he suggested tentatively, “you don’t feel your old delight in it? Or do you?”

“When there’s any occasion,” said Stacey. “There, for instance.” And he pulled from a mass of papers a drawing of a detail—a wrought-iron balcony for a window. His eyes showed pleasure.

“Yes. By Jove, yes! That is good Stacey! Fine and—sure at the same time. You’re better than you used to be. For Henderson’s house? Pity it’s so sort of wasted. I mean, that it won’t be appreciated.”

“Oh, I don’t feel that,” Stacey replied. “I feel that it’s worth while enough to do anything good, even a molding for a room,—I don’t know why.”

Mr. Parkins looked surprised. “Well, that’s the right way to feel, of course. There’s one thing certain,” he added, getting up. “You go into the firm the first of the month. And there’s no favoritism about that, either.”

“All right,” said Stacey. “Thanks. It’s awfully good of you.” And he went to work again.

What Mr. Parkins had said was true. Stacey was a better architect than formerly. He was still affectionately interested in detail, because that interest had always been a part of him, and he knew enough now to understand calmly that nothing in one ever vanished; but he saw things in a larger, more solid way than once.

Hammond, a younger man who was put under Stacey’s guidance, questioned him about Stacey’s preliminary sketch for a competition. It was of a great stone bridge that was to cross both branches of the river in the heart of the railway and warehouse section.

“Don’t you think it’s maybe a little—oh, well, grim, Carroll?” asked Hammond, puzzled.

“Good Lord! man,” said Stacey, “think where it is—mud, noise, confusion!”

Stacey shook his head. “I’m no damned beauty-doctor. Just the facts—the right ones—in the best way.”

Stacey played tennis hard for an hour every afternoon when he had finished work; for his strong body craved exercise. But his mind did not crave companionship. He mingled with only a few people, and most of these doubtless resented his manner as seeming hard and cold. In this they were wrong. Stacey was merely aloof. He was not superior, judging these people adversely; he was simply not letting them in—or himself into them. He had a feeling that this world of personal relationships was too rich. It was more like a sea. One might be swept away futilely on it. Toward those whom he did admit as companions—and they were sometimes the unlikeliest people—he was prodigal of interest, in his own different way as altruistic as Mrs. Latimer.

For his hasty luncheon Stacey frequented a small cheap restaurant near-by. So, also, did Jack Edwards, who had been commander of the local American Legion post at the time Stacey had set it in a turmoil, but was so no longer, having been succeeded by some one less incongruously radical. The two fell into the habit of sitting down at table together for their fifteen-minute meal, and Stacey found himself at once attracted by the other man. Something in his firm lined face—perhaps the odd expression of the brown eyes—hinted at a tortured courageous personality. Stacey was friendly from the first. Edwards, on the other hand, was in the beginning obviously suspicious. But he thawed gradually, and the two became friends, united by some deep, almost unrecognized resemblance between them. Yet for a long time their talk was hardly more than casual comment on events.

“What do you do after lunch?” asked Stacey one June day, as they pushed back their chairs and rose. “You must surely take more time off than this before going back to work.”

“Oh,” the other replied, “I generally stroll around for twenty minutes—down to the river sometimes.”

“Come up to my office and smoke a cigarette, won’t you? There’ll be no one there for half an hour yet.”

“Don’t care if I do.” And the two men paid their checks and went out together, Stacey walking slowly, since Edwards limped badly on account of his wounded leg.

In Stacey’s room they sat down, with the littered desk between them, and smoked silently for some minutes. Stacey had his feet up against the side of an open drawer, but suddenly he swung them down and turned to face his friend.

“Edwards,” he demanded abruptly, “what do you think of the war, anyway?”

The muscles of the other man’s rather stern face contracted slightly. “Think of it?” he returned. “I don’t think of it. I don’t want to. Once in a while I dream.”

Stacey considered him with grim comprehension. From almost any one else the remark would have sounded melodramatic. Edwards made it quite sincerely, with no thought of effect. When the raw black-and-white stuff of melodrama became truth—that was horrible. Stacey shivered. But after a little he returned to it. “Yes, but I mean: do you feel now that it was all bad, all rotten selfish commercialism from the very beginning? Oh, you’ve every right to! I don’t blame you and your people if you do. But do you?”

“We’ve been tricked,” Edwards replied bitterly, “duped! And I’ll take that point of view—the one you ask me if I have—publicly as long as I live. It’s the only way for me and mine to fight you and yours. Just as the way for your side to fight is to assert that the war was noble. But—it’s not so simple. No, I don’t think that.”

“No more do I!” cried Stacey. “I hate the war! It brought out everything rotten that lay hidden in men. But—some hundreds of thousands of young men did go into it nobly, and to just that extent it was a decent war. They’re mostly dead now—worse luck to the world!—and a good many of those that aren’t are turned beastly by what they lived through. But . . .” He paused. A kind of dark light smoldered in his eyes.

“There was courage,” said Edwards in a deep voice. “My God! there was courage! Not your romantic high-adventure sort, but the sort that could live through mud and intensive shelling and still push men on, afterward, to advance. But, oh, Christ! the wasted lives in the Argonne!—thrown away through sheer incompetence! Your people did that!”

“And even so,” said Stacey somberly, “you didn’t see the Somme.” Suddenly the dull glow in his eyes rose to a flame. He struck the desk with his clenched fist. “The thing that gets me, Edwards,” he burst out, “is these beastly cheap editors of weeklies sitting up and writing pertly about the war as if it had been all a game of grab, nothing decent! Damn them! Petty complacent asses! What do they know about it? What do they know about physical courage—or any other kind? Have they suffered? Have they fought for ideals and been given dung? The Intellectuals, they call themselves! An honest protester like Debs, all right, I’ll respect him. But these vulgar underbred egotists—faugh! The only ones I hate as much are the others who sit up and write about how everything was first-rate—bully war—noble—good clearly coming out of it!” He ceased, panting with rage.

Stacey drew his hand across his forehead. “You’re right,” he returned. “It’s idiotic! I thought I’d learned better. And,” he added, laughing shortly, “fancy wasting emotion on that tribe!”

He felt dizzy and faintly nauseated, as though poisoned, and he was rather ashamed. It was a flash out of an earlier side of him.

For Stacey was like a fabric that was being woven together steadily out of varied strands. But here and there the woof was faulty; the pattern was broken; threads stuck out loosely.

But moments of hate such as this were rare. Generally he was cool enough—cooler and perhaps more tolerant than Edwards, who always in general talk showed himself bitterly conscious of the “class struggle.” Edwards came up to the office for a few minutes after luncheon nearly every day now, and as long as the two men talked personally or of concrete subjects he forgot his obsession—or, rather, seemed almost irately unable to apply it in any way to Stacey; but at the least broadening of the conversation it emerged, a sullen thing.

“Come out to dinner with us some evening, will you? To-night, if you like,” Stacey suggested once.

Stacey laughed. “Why not? Bound to have no dealings with the devil or any of his allies? Better come. You’d like my father. You’d fight with him, but you’d like him.”

“I don’t want to,” said Edwards. “I don’t want to like any of your crew. It’s their likableness that I resent. Of course they’re likable. Why shouldn’t they be? They’ve leisure and all the appurtenances essential to becoming so. We’ve got to fight them—you, as class against class.”

Edwards flushed. “You’re too rotten clever, Carroll,” he replied resentfully. “It’s easy for you to make me appear in the wrong.”

“No,” said Stacey, “I simply fancy you’re wrong to think in classes. They’re abstractions. If everybody would drop them men could meet as men.”

“Oh,” exclaimed Edwards, clearly out of patience, “it’s all very well for you to sit there and talk! You can afford to be sweetly reasonable. You’re fixed—safe. You’ve everything. Of course you can talk unselfishly; you can even talk like a revolutionary. You know damn well there isn’t going to be any revolution—not yet.”

“Well, as for that,” said Stacey mildly, “I’ll admit that I live in a luxurious house with all sorts of comforts—pleasant enough in their way. Only how much do they amount to? I’m not essentially soft. I go on inhabiting the place because it’s there, because I haven’t any particular social theories (I don’t, for instance, see what good my not living there would do any one), because of my father, and because of Catherine Blair, my friend Phil’s widow, and her boys.”

Edwards’ face was crimson. “I didn’t mean what I said, Carroll,” he blurted out. “I know well enough that—oh, well, I apologize.”

“Shucks!” said Stacey, “that’s all right. It’s a good thing to look into one’s own existence now and then. For the rest, I dare say that I’m paid more than I’m worth for my work here. I can’t tell, and I don’t intend to waste much time worrying about it. I probably earn more than a skilled mechanic like you, and that’s wrong. I earn less than a broker, and that’s wrong. I can, because of my aptitude and a long training, build decent houses. How’s any one to know what my exact remuneration should be?”

Stacey was engrossed with the plans for the bridge one afternoon when the office-boy poked his head in at the door.

So when a moment later he looked up to see Irene Loeffler standing opposite him he fairly gaped with surprise. But he rose quickly and went around the desk to her.

“How are you?” he said. “I didn’t hear you come in. Sit down, do! It’s a long time since I’ve seen you.”

She shook hands, dropped his hand quickly, then flung herself into a chair. She was the same abrupt disconcerting person as ever. Just now she was a trifle flushed with embarrassment.

Stacey sat down near her—but not too near—and considered her with a polite external gravity. Inwardly he was amused by the recollection of her advances, somewhat remorseful at having treated her so roughly, and just a little apprehensive.

“Wanted to see you, Mr. Carroll,” Irene began gruffly, “and this seemed a good place. Sorry to disturb you, though.”

But there was a faint tremor in her voice. Her affectation of mannishness made her appear only the more feminine, Stacey thought. In an odd way she was attractive.

Irene swallowed once or twice. “Well,” she said, trying again for a beginning, “I wanted to tell you something. I suppose you’ve got a rotten opinion of me. Haven’t you?” she demanded, staring at him, a sulky childish look about her mouth.

“Well, you’d have a right to, I guess. Anyway, what I wanted to tell you was that I’ve come to my senses. You haven’t anything to fear from me any more.”

“Fine!” said Stacey, laughing in spite of his best efforts. “Awfully good fellow! I think you’ve chosen well. I’ll send you a wedding present.” And he held out his hand.

But she did not take it. Instead she twisted her handkerchief nervously around her fingers. Stacey had never seen any one with so little repose.

“Do you think,” she demanded abruptly, “that it’s all right for me to marry him?”

“Well, I mean,” she said sullenly, her lower lip quivering like that of a child about to cry, “I mean—after what I said to you.”

Stacey understood now and was touched. “Why, you silly child!” he exclaimed, “I never heard of anything so absurd! If that’s the worst thing you ever did you’ve the purest past in the world!”

She brightened, tears of relief standing in her eyes. “But anyway I must tell Paul about it, mustn’t I?”

“No!” Stacey almost shouted, overcome with a mixture of amazement and admiration. “There’s nothing to tell!”

Irene wiped her eyes, in obvious resentment at the need. “All right, then,” she said. “Thanks.” And now she shook hands. Then she looked at Stacey with a tremulous smile. “You’ve got a lot of charm,” she announced.

Stacey thought often of Marian, but he did not see her until July. He had left the office late one afternoon and was walking briskly along the boulevard on the way to the tennis courts when she called to him from her open car. It drew up at the curb beside him, and Marian reached out her hand to him gracefully. She was coming from a tea, she said, and she was wearing a lacy dress of blue and silver and a drooping picture-hat, white and transparent, that cast soft shadow over her face without really obscuring it. Against the deep cushions of the tonneau she looked small, elegant and sophisticated. It occurred to Stacey that it was nonsense for him to be concerned about her. Their meeting must have appeared to an outsider like one of those Salon pictures of an encounter in the Bois de Boulogne.

“You’re looking very well, Stacey,” she said gaily, “but you don’t deserve to have me say so. Here you’ve been back for two months without coming near me! It’s not respectful.”

Marian’s arm hung limply along the edge of the car. She drummed idly with her hand against the polished enamel. And the gesture seemed to sum her up—perfection, graceful ennui, and all.

“Oh,” she said, “you’ll just say you’ll come, and that will be the end of it unless I pin you down. So I will. Come—let’s see!—come on Monday at five and have tea with me.”

“All right. Thanks. I’ll be coming straight from the office, so I’ll look dingy probably. Hope you won’t mind.”

“Gracious, no!” she replied, apparently without malice, and laughing rather delightfully. “It’s not your clothes I care about seeing. I’ve got clothes. Till Monday, then.” She touched the chauffeur’s back lightly with the tip of her slender blue-and-white parasol, and the car moved away smoothly.

He gazed after her for a moment, and again he dubbed himself a fussy fool. He forgot that one’s thought of a person is direct, without veils; so that in an actual encounter after long separation one is aware chiefly of the veils.

But it was only his father and Catherine whom Stacey saw constantly. He spent nearly all his evenings at home. Sometimes he would read or would merely look on while Catherine and Mr. Carroll played cards. And he was amused at this; for he did not think that Catherine liked cards really. When he thought she had endured enough he would insist on playing in her stead, declaring that she was usurping his place in the home. Or, again, they would all three merely sit and talk. But this made Mr. Carroll restless. He demanded, Stacey could see, some direct problem, even if a small one, to occupy his mind. He could talk while he played cards, but talk was for him no end in itself; it was a pleasant accompaniment to something else that led somewhere.

On other evenings, when Mr. Carroll must speak at a banquet or welcome some visiting potentate of the Republican Party (Mr. Harding was nominated by now, and Mr. Carroll, at first disappointed, soon perceived that the choice was a wise one), Stacey would sit with Catherine or, more often, walk with her in the garden.

He felt that he did not know Catherine at all, and he was aware that this was partly his fault. He had always thought of her as Phil’s wife, and she still evoked for him the memory of Phil rather than any clear image of her own. Yet, though he could not have said what she was like, he admired her more than any one else he knew. It was no good to ask himself why. He could say vaguely that she was clear and cool as deep water . . . that she had a profound truthfulness . . . that there was a quality of Fact in her:—what did all that mean? Only once had her personality touched his in a flash,—on that afternoon when she had pleaded with him—but commandingly almost, if gently—not to go to Marian, and he had cut her with cruel words because he had yielded. He bit his lip in shame at the thought.

And she was so shy, so immensely reserved. She was not really at her ease with him, he saw, except when the boys were present or his father. She would talk about herself, when Stacey questioned her, as though she were talking of some one else.

“What do you do with your day, Catherine?” he asked once. “I mean, when the boys are away at school.”

This seemed to startle her, rather. “I—I write, or try to, regularly, Stacey,” she replied, after a moment.

They were walking in the garden, and he paused suddenly to stare at her. “You mean—things to publish?” he cried, amazed.

“No! No! I don’t mean that! I should think you probably had more to say than any one else I know, only—pardon me, Catherine!—oh, well, let’s be frank!—expression isn’t your forte.”

“Little articles,” she replied haltingly. “Mostly for English papers. It’s hard to get them accepted here. One or two places—do—sometimes.”

“Never!” she exclaimed, horrified. “And I don’t sign my own name, so it’s useless to look.”

“You’re exasperating, Catherine!” he cried, and meant it. Then he laughed suddenly. “I’ll bet they’re radical—oh, radical! Tell me, Catherine,” he added maliciously, “when you’ve gone upstairs after my father has talked about Bolshevism at some length, do you sit down then and write your subversive stuff? A double life—that’s what you’re leading!”

Yet Stacey’s persistent attempt to get at Catherine was not the result of mere curiosity, even the curiosity of affection. At heart he felt vaguely that she was immensely lonely in her isolation, in great need of sharing her grief for Phil with some one else. He would have her make such a friend of him as Phil had made him.

CHAPTER XXII

In 1910 Harriet Price, Ames’s mother and widow of John Price, who had been head of the Price Tractor and Motor Company, built a new house. In 1912 she died, and the mansion, together with many other good things, among them a controlling interest in the tractor company, passed to Ames, the only child.

The house, which was an immense square building of yellow stone in the Italian Renaissance style, occupied, with its grounds, an entire block in the best section of the fashionable boulevard. Stacey had always rather liked the exterior, though it was not Parkins and May but a Chicago firm of architects who had built the house. It was severe, commanding, less inharmonious in Vernon than most anachronisms, and the four great chimneys were really fine. Never having cared for the Prices, Stacey had seen the interior but once—at a large house-warming affair given in the winter of 1910, to which he had gone out of curiosity. It had struck him then as Chicago decorators’ stuff (which it was), proper, faultlessly in period, quite without character. He remembered perfectly the dreariness of his impression.

So now, when he entered the vast hall, his first glimpse of it made him aware of change.

“Mr. Carroll, sir?” asked the English butler. “Will you go upstairs, please? Mrs. Price is expecting you there, sir.”

“Yes,” said Stacey, “half a minute.” He walked quickly across the hall and stood for a moment at the entrance to the great drawing-room on the left. As he looked in he smiled, half appreciatively, half ironically. Change? Well, rather! To begin with, Marian—it was Marian, of course—had swept away pretty much everything that had been in that room when Stacey had first seen it. But, even supposing the discarded furniture and pictures to have been sold, he hardly thought the present relative bareness had saved Ames money. That long table, the Florentine chest, and the copy of a relief in marble with touches of blue and gold (Desiderio da Settignano?)—if it was a copy—h’m! He turned back. “All right,” he said to the butler. “I’ll go up.”

As he mounted the broad stone stairway, the man following, his glance rested on a tapestry—a Medici tapestry, if he knew anything about it. “Whew!” he thought. But his eyes were just a little hard now. Marian would take and take—and give nothing. All the same, what did she get from it? Again he felt suddenly unreasoningly sorry for her.

The butler conducted Stacey to the south end of the upper hall, tapped perfunctorily at a door, opened it, and Stacey went in.

The room he entered was a small sitting-room—Marian’s own, most certainly—English in feeling, crowded with a great many things. Or, rather, no, on second thought Stacey knew it well:—it was like what pleasant English people did sometimes to their smallest, best loved room in a Tuscan villa. The French windows were wide open, but the heavy wooden shutters were closed to shut out the heat, so that only a soft summer air entered, with perfumes from the garden outside. There was a kind of radiant greenish twilight in the room.

No one was there, though a flame burned beneath a silver kettle, two fragile cups stood ready, and a tea-wagon with bread and butter and cake was drawn up near the table. After perhaps a minute Marian entered through another door.

She was wearing a simple dress of a pearl gray color, short, as the fashion was, and with a silver cord about the waist. She looked as Greek as any one or anything modern could look, and Stacey drew in his breath sharply with admiration of her beauty. Nevertheless, as he shook hands with her and replied to her apparently natural greeting, he was wary. All this delightful readiness for his visit, the coziness, the shining tea things, Marian herself. . . . “ ‘I mistrust the Greeks and the gifts they bring,’ ” he said to himself suddenly, and smiled, finding the quotation apt, Marian looking as she did. But he kept it to himself.

Marian sat down at the table, but remained for a moment gracefully idle, smiling at him, before beginning to make the tea.

“You see all my preparations, Stacey,” she said lightly. “You see what an event it is when you come. Aren’t you flattered?”

“You know I am,” he returned, almost disarmed now by her remark. And this was true. For Stacey was genuinely anxious to be friends with Marian. After all, at bottom he was a simple person. That is, he was complex only on his receptive side. He could perceive, quite without effort, the subtlest, most tangled, personal relationships all about him, whether or not he was himself involved in them; he had always been able to do this. But the real Stacey Carroll in the centre of this rich shimmering web remained simple. The impulses on which he acted were simple, almost boyish sometimes.

Marian and Stacey were both silent while she measured out the tea and poured the hot water. Gazing at her so closely, he noted that she was very thin. Her fine pointed face was almost sharp, and her bare arms, lifted prettily to the silver urn, were too slender. Stacey was sorry. But, considering himself questioningly, he recognized that this half-pity for Marian, together with an artist’s admiration of her loveliness, was all that he felt for her now. Absolutely all. No touch of love remained. And Stacey was immensely relieved.

“It has to brew seven minutes,” said Marian, glancing at her tiny turquoise-incrusted wrist-watch, then leaning back in a corner of her chair and resting her long slim hands on one arm of it.

“Most people treat tea-making so clumsily,” Stacey remarked. “You make it an art, just as you do with all the other daily things. They acquire distinction. That’s nice.”

“Thanks,” she said idly, “but it’s only that it tastes better if it’s made right, you know.”

“And isn’t that something? Marian,” he added, noting that her fingers were quite bare, “don’t you wear your rings any more?”

She glanced down at her hands. “No,” she said, “I don’t like them. And they slip off.”

She gave him a quick hard smile. “Of course not. I must keep myself a handsome objet d’art, mustn’t I? I remember all about the Parthenon, Stacey.”

“No, no!” he answered, discouraged, getting a glimpse of her antagonism, “I didn’t mean that! I only meant that you must stay well. What a rotter you must think me, to take my remark like that! As far as that goes, you’re more beautiful at present than I’ve ever seen you,” he added simply.

But he saw her bite her lip after her pettish outburst, and he felt lost—baffled. To save him, he could not make out what she was after; whether she regretted her spiteful little attack because it was not in line with a carefully prepared program or because she merely wanted to be friendly and hadn’t meant to grow petulant. His mind played restlessly over the whole situation and could make nothing of it.

It was some little time before she could again conquer his wariness, but she did so at last. There is a smooth disarming intimacy about the tea-hour. The ceremony of tea itself is so fine; it is elegant, aloof and gracious; it ministers to taste yet not to appetite; people are not there to chew and be nourished. And then the hour itself is lovable—the sun’s rays growing level, dust in the air turned golden, a hush perceptible even through the city’s noise. Stacey surrendered to the atmosphere of intimacy. He drank the fragrant China tea and talked without restraint of a number of things. Perhaps, he thought, he and Marian might still be friends. He had treated her abominably and was sorry for it now that he understood her better, though she, he admitted, understood him better than he her.

“You gather so much fineness together, Marian,” he remarked once. “All that you touch becomes fine, turns to gold.” He ceased abruptly. That was the wrong allusion, he thought, annoyed at his clumsiness.

But she did not seem to mind it. “You’re really quite kindly toward me, aren’t you, Stacey?” she replied, with perhaps just a hint of irony in her voice, but smiling pleasantly.

“No reason at all, of course,” she said prettily, making him a mocking little bow. “Have some more tea.”

He held out his cup, watched her fill it, then set it down again, all mechanically. “People get in states of mind—for no particular reason,” he said vaguely, feeling apologetic yet not wanting to go into the matter—as much on her account as on his.

“Yes, and then into others. Tell me:—do you feel kindly toward everybody now?”

“Oh, I shouldn’t go so far as to claim that!” he replied uncomfortably. It went against his whole nature to talk about himself to Marian, yet he felt he owed her some sort of confession. So he went on haltingly. “I used to get awfully worked up about a lot of things—about people being greedy, for instance. I don’t mean any one person—everybody, whole human race. But then,” he concluded diffidently, “it struck me that they weren’t hateful on account of it, but only pathetic, since their greed never brought them happiness—never!”

Marian’s face was half turned away from him and she was resting her chin in her cupped hand—an old familiar pose—so that he could not see her expression. But all at once she dropped her hand, lay back in her chair, and laughed musically, startling him.

“Oh, Stacey, you’re so funny!” she exclaimed. “I’ve told you that before. But I think,” she added, not laughing now, smiling at him deliberately, “that I liked you better in your fierce, world-defying, Byronic stage, when you were so dramatic, than now in this Christ-like phase.”

He winced sharply. She had really hurt him there. He despised people who went sweetly through the world doing good to others; which was what she meant. Stacey flushed hotly. But he caught a fleeting gleam of triumph in Marian’s eyes, and at this his anger and most of his shame left him, and he only felt drearily that it was no use, she hated him and had got him there on purpose to take this sort of small revenge. It was true that she had led him on and stabbed just when he had generously disarmed; she had not played fair. But, after all, why should she?

She baffled him to-day, though. He thought that now he was in for it, that she would try to lead him into some further trap. Instead, she grew suddenly listless, talked indifferently of casual things, or, again, talked rapidly and artificially. She made no more onslaughts, was rather kind to him than otherwise, ringing for the butler to bring up a brand of cigarettes of which she knew Stacey was fond. But he felt her to be immensely sophisticated, with no girlishness remaining. Leaning back in her chair she had the weary perfection of something finished, complete and soulless. There was no trace left in her of the elfish charm for which he had once loved her idolatrously. Nor had there been at the very beginning of the afternoon when she had seemed fresh and spontaneous.

She went down to the door with him when he left her, but she shook hands almost apathetically.

He puzzled over it as he walked homeward. He could not understand what Marian had been about. Surely she had not summoned him to give him that one thrust. She was too clever not to have been able to do more than that if revenge was what she had been after. It did not occur to him that Marian might simply have been intolerably bored and have wanted him as some kind of relief, to cajole or stab as the mood struck her. What Stacey did feel was that it was restful to go back to Catherine and his father from so much futile complexity. Not that they were so limpid, either, come to think about it; Catherine especially wasn’t. But they were direct.

The interview left him feeling a little sore,—not altogether, though partly, because he had been wounded in his self-esteem. But this did not last; the matter was too trivial to annoy him for long. He forgot all about it in his work.

It was just two weeks later at about four in the afternoon when the door of Stacey’s office was thrown open and Ames Price strode in. Stacey’s first feeling was one of surprise and repressed amusement; for he had not seen Ames since the evening of the outrageous jest played on him at the road-house. Stacey’s second emotion, following immediately, was a sick comprehending horror. It was as though he had known everything beforehand in a dream that he had forgotten and that had fought in vain to break loose and summon him.

Ames’s heavy face was set, in a struggle for self-control, and his voice when he spoke was thick and difficult.

Stacey had already sprung to his feet. He was paler than Ames. “Yes,” he said, and snatched up his hat.

The other clenched his fists. “You mean to say—you know already, damn you? Some one’s told you?”

“Slowly—through the office. No fuss. Got to smile. Latimer said so.” It was as though Ames were reciting a ritual.

Together they went down in the elevator and out of the building. It was August, but the car that Ames had brought was a closed car. “Latimer again,” thought Stacey, with a touch of loathing beneath the horror that filled his mind. They set off swiftly.

“It’s—Marian,” said Ames. “She shot herself this morning. Dying. She—asks for you.” He looked at Stacey—dully rather than with hatred.

It was this, of course, or something like it, Stacey knew already; but to hear it in words was abominable. A chill ran over his body. He felt physically nauseated. He set his teeth.

The car drove up beneath the porte-cochère of the Prices’ house, and the two men got out. They went upstairs together silently.

In Marian’s exquisite boudoir stood a black group of people. Stacey recognized none of them at first, only caught a feeling of their heavy incongruity in that place. Then he saw that Mr. Latimer was one and that another was a doctor whom he knew. There was a nurse also. From somewhere Mrs. Latimer appeared, and Stacey perceived that she was a haggard old woman. A look of relief softened her eyes a very little at sight of him.

“She wants to see you, Stacey,” Mrs. Latimer murmured. “I’ll speak to the doctor inside,” and she went through a door.

Stacey pulled him aside a little way. “It won’t do any harm?” he demanded hoarsely.

“No, no harm. Better to let her have her way. There’s nothing to be done. The bullet missed the heart and penetrated the lung instead. The wound is dressed. Be as calm as you can.”

“Not the faintest. She is—well, there’s no hope,” replied the doctor, rather kindly.

“Just a minute, then,” said Stacey. He leaned against a wall and struggled for composure. Then he wiped his forehead with his handkerchief. “All right,” he said, and went through the door with the doctor and Marian’s mother.

The room beyond was hushed, cool and darkened. Mrs. Latimer led Stacey to the bedside, then withdrew to a distant corner of the room and stood there, motionless, with the nurse and the doctor. When he looked that way he could see them like dim figures in the background of some faded Venetian picture.

Marian was propped up within it, and her face, that was turned sideways toward him on the pillows, was like alabaster, thin, veined and bloodless; but her beauty was unmarred, heightened even—like a statue of her beauty. The only color anywhere was in her bright hair that was spread about the pillow.

He did so, gently. Her voice was scarcely more than a musical murmur, and between phrases she gasped for breath. “Don’t talk!” he begged. “Let me talk to you, Marian.”

“No,” she said, “I must talk to you, Stacey. Not much—only a little.” She paused, panting.

Stacey was wrenched with pain. This was unbearable. His forehead was damp with sweat.

“I wanted—to tell you,” she went on almost inaudibly, “oh, lots of things! Not to worry—for one. It’s just—as well. Only—isn’t it like me,” she said, with a faint smile, “to fail—even in this?”

“Marian—please!” he muttered, tightening his hold on her hand for an instant. It was the pathos of her frail attempt at cynicism that shook him. For now she no longer looked the weary, perfect, grown-up woman; she seemed a little girl. To watch her die was like watching a child die—or a dream.

“I hurt you, Stacey. I—didn’t mean to,” she said softly, and managed to stroke his hand, ever so faintly.

It was perhaps the first time he had found tenderness in her. He set his teeth hard.

“I must say—what I have to—quickly,” she went on. “You are not to—blame yourself, Stacey. You have—nothing—to—do—with—it.” She paused for a moment, struggling for breath. “I was—all wrong—twisted. You were right. You couldn’t love me—or I you—not even you. I could not bear—life—any longer—having made—such a mess—of it.”

She closed her eyes weakly, and he thought that she slept or—had died. But presently they fluttered open again. “I’m sorry,” she murmured, “that I said—what I did—to you—the other day. It was not—true—and I did not mean it—even then.”

She held his fingers close. “Poor Stacey!” she whispered. “It’s not your fault.”

Again she paused. And after a moment an elfish smile stirred her lips. “Do I look—a fright?” she asked.

“Well, that’s good!” she murmured, with the ghost of a laugh. “Par—thenon.”

He bent over and touched her white cheek with his lips, then rose slowly to his feet and made his way back unsteadily to the others.

“I don’t know,” he muttered hoarsely to the doctor. “You’d better feel her pulse.”

The doctor went quickly to the bed, then, after a moment, returned. “Just the same—or only a little weaker. She’s asleep,” he whispered.

Stacey looked at Mrs. Latimer. “I’ll go, then. You’ll keep me informed—by ’phone?” he pleaded.

He returned to the other room, dizzily. “She’s sleeping just now,” he said to Marian’s husband. “Will you—have your car take me—home?”

They went out into the hall together. Stacey stumbled, and Ames grasped his arm and held it.

Stacey turned mechanically to stare at him. Up to now he had only been vaguely aware of the man’s presence.

“It is perhaps unnecessary for me to warn you to say nothing of this,” said Marian’s father stonily. “It must be kept out of the papers.”

It was just what Stacey needed. He straightened up, anger rushing through him like a hot flood. “Go to hell!” he said, then swung about and walked quickly and firmly downstairs, with Ames following.

At the door of the car the two men gazed at each other helplessly. There was no antagonism between them now. In some odd way they were even united.

So was Stacey glad. His anger was all that sustained him on the ride home. For he felt that everything was Mr. Latimer’s fault. All the worst of Marian he had given her. Almost he had pointed the revolver.

CHAPTER XXIII

Stacey let himself in with a latch-key, then hurried up the stairs to his own rooms. Once in his study, he threw himself down upon a couch and lay there for a long time, motionless, his hands thrown back and clasped beneath his head. But there was no relaxation in his stillness. His body was tense, and now and then a spasm contracted the taut muscles of his face. The late western sunlight poured in through the windows and flickered brightly across the wall, and the shrill distant voices of children at play were audible.

At last Stacey turned his head slowly to look at a small travelling clock on a stand near the couch. The hands pointed to six-thirty. He got up with an effort, pressed the button of a bell, then sat down at his desk, rested his head in his hands, and stared blindly out of the window.

“If Mrs. Blair is in,” he said, without moving, when Parker entered the room, “please ask her if she will be so kind as to come up here for a few minutes.”

Presently Catherine tapped at the door, and Stacey rose wearily. “Come in!” he called.

She looked fresh and very young to him who felt so old. “You wanted to see me?” she began, then broke off to gaze at him in alarm. “Stacey!” she cried, “what’s the matter?”

“Catherine,” he said in a monotonous voice, “do me a favor, please. Tell my father I won’t be down to dinner—and why. Marian Latimer shot herself this morning. She is dying. I have just been there. It has rather knocked me out.”

Catherine had turned pale, and her eyes were wide with horror. “Oh!” she gasped, then suddenly went closer to him. “Stacey,” she said gently, “sit down.”

He obeyed and resumed his former pose, staring again out of the window. “Don’t let the servants hear what you say,” he went on, in the same dead tone. “It’s to be kept secret. And don’t let father come up to see me. He would be kind, but I can’t see him now.”

She drew in her breath sharply, but said nothing,—only laid her hand on his shoulder.

At this he swung about, as though the touch had loosened something within him. “It’s the ghastly—waste that gets me—so hard!” he cried, his face set with pain. “Death itself—that’s nothing! An episode! But to see so much loveliness, so much fineness, all go wrong—obliquely—to futile death as to—a climax! It’s unbearable!”

“But yes! My fault! If I could only have gone on loving her, or if, not loving her, I had married her, things might have been different. Not so—complete a mess! We’d have become adjusted—somehow.”

Catherine drew up a chair swiftly and sat down close to him. “Stacey,” she cried unsteadily, her eyes shining with tears, “I beg of you—you mustn’t! The truth is bad enough,—ah, please don’t go beyond the truth! It was not your fault—only in as much as what happens to any one in the whole world is one’s fault. Poor lovely Marian!—there was something—I don’t know—something twisted in her.”

At this and at the soft compassion of her voice Stacey looked toward Catherine differently. “Twisted—it was what she called herself only half an hour ago,” he said in a gentler tone.

They were silent for a time. Something in the young woman’s clear presence comforted him.

“She looked like a little girl, Catherine,” he said at last, only sorrowfully. “You would not have known her. And so beautiful! Oh, wicked!” Again his face contracted.

And, indeed, though he did not see it at the moment, as poignant an emotion for him as any in all the tragedy lay in the destruction of so much sheer beauty. Afterward, weeks afterward, he perceived this, and recognized with pain that Marian herself had understood it, even tenderly at the last.

The bell of the telephone on Stacey’s desk rang, and he reached slowly for the receiver. Catherine gazed at him apprehensively, but he spoke quietly enough, just a few words, in reply to the message, then hung up the receiver and turned to Catherine.

“She is dead,” he murmured. “She died in her sleep. She never waked after I left her.”

“You must go down, Catherine,” Stacey said finally. “It is almost seven. Thank you.”

“No! No! I can’t eat!” he exclaimed with revulsion. “I have to think,” he added, “of what to say to Mrs. Latimer. I must go to see her after a while. What can I say?”

Catherine gave him a look in which there was something like pride. But all that she answered was that he must eat something; then went out.

He sat there, reflecting painfully. He felt tired, hopeless, alive in a dead empty world, but he was less tense now.

After a while—in half an hour, perhaps—the door opened and Catherine herself came in with a tray.

He smiled faintly at this. “You will have your way, won’t you?” he remarked; but he ate a little while she sat watching him.

“Stacey,” she asked diffidently, when he had finished, “should you like me to go with you?”

“To Mrs. Latimer’s?” he exclaimed. “Oh, would you? But no,” he added impatiently, “why should I lay things on you?”

“You won’t be doing that. If I could, perhaps, share a little, I should be glad. You’ve had—nearly enough, I think.”

“Oh!” he said, with a start, when she returned, “I must order the car brought around.” And he reached for the telephone.

And when they went down the stairs they met nobody either there or in the hall. That, too, was Catherine’s work, he thought with a softening touch of gratitude.

He sat silent during the ride, trying to think what he should say to Mrs. Latimer. But he could find nothing; he could only trust to the moment. It was a horrible task. Yet he was not undertaking it as a duty; he was going only because he was overwhelmingly sorry for his old friend and concerned about her. At any rate, Catherine’s quiet presence was of some help. He felt her as not weak in her compassion but strong.

It demanded a real effort for him to ring the bell of the Latimers’ house, but he did so, and after a little while a maid opened the door.

“I know. That she could not see any one. But she will want to see me, I think. Just let me go quietly in. She is in the drawing-room?”

Stacey winced. This made it harder. But he went quietly through the hall and into the familiar room; and Catherine followed him, a step or two behind. Just across the threshold he paused.

Only a single shaded reading-lamp was burning, and that at the farthest corner of the long room; so that the part nearest Stacey was all in darkness. At first the only person in the room appeared to be Mr. Latimer, who, his hands clasped behind his back, was pacing up and down across the far end of it, from lamp to window and from window to lamp. When he approached the lamp and turned, his face was illuminated from below, so that the chin and the delicate selfish mouth showed clearly, while the eyes and forehead remained shadowy. Stacey could not conquer his feeling of bitter hardness. The man was suffering, no doubt, in his own way, but he was not generous enough—so Stacey thought—to suffer deeply. He looked proud even now, when it was no time for pride; he should have been comforting his wife. And what had he done? What had he done? Could he not understand?

But Stacey gave him only a moment of thought. His eyes were searching the room for Mrs. Latimer. And presently he found her—a wrecked huddled figure on a couch just opposite him. Her face was hidden among the cushions; only her hair, her dark dress, and one clenched hand were visible.

She sat up with a gasp; but it was her husband who spoke. “Who is there?” he called sharply, pausing and gazing toward Stacey.

Mr. Latimer stiffened. “This is no time for you to come to this house,” he said coldly. “You should know that. I do not wish to see you.”

“No,” Stacey replied. “But I came to see Mrs. Latimer—unless she would prefer not to have me.”

The woman on the couch leaned forward. “Oh, yes, Stacey!” she cried, in a tone that went to his heart. He was sure of himself now; he was indifferent to what Mr. Latimer might say.

The older man stood there, erect in the lamplight, handsome, implacable, but to Stacey non-existent. “Either you or I, Carroll, must leave this house,” he said haughtily. “Both of us—”

But at this Mrs. Latimer had sprung to her feet, tottering a little. “Then,” she cried, in a tense voice that told Stacey much, “it must be you, Herbert! I wish to see Stacey. Oh,” she murmured weakly, but with relief, “and Catherine—you’ve come! How—good!” And she sank down again upon the couch.

As Stacey moved toward her he, too, for a moment thought of Catherine. He knew well how shy, how retiring, even how shrinking she was by nature; yet all through this brief unpleasant scene he had felt her standing there, gently strong, not wincing.

Stacey knelt on the rug before the couch, but, though Mrs. Latimer touched his hair tremblingly and had sent away her husband to have him there, it was to Catherine that she turned, clasping her hand and making the young woman sit down close beside her on the divan.

The half-hour that followed was atrocious, worse than anything Stacey had ever been through. For he had seen bodies shockingly tortured and minds driven to madness by pain and terror, but this was the destruction of a noble personality, of a character built up bravely through long effort; it was the negation of everything. And the worst of it was that in the broken phrases that Mrs. Latimer cried out—sometimes to him, mostly to Catherine—traces remained of her high, clear, unified intelligence, like drifting debris of a wrecked ship. “My little girl! My poor baby!” she broke out once. “A child again only when—dying! Wasted—wasted—all for nothing, a whole life! Oh, it’s my fault!—no, his! his! his!” (this with a terrible fierceness). “No, mine, too! mine, too!”

But there were pauses of exhaustion between her outbursts, and after a while she grew slightly calmer, merely clinging to Catherine, who spoke little, but in a tone of infinite tenderness. Beneath everything else Stacey felt an awe of Catherine for her deep calm that expressed the very opposite of indifference. As for himself, he could find nothing to do (which was perhaps as well) save once to slip out into the hall and telephone the doctor whom he had seen at Marian’s bedside, to say that he must come with something to put Mrs. Latimer to sleep.

“If I make you some chocolate, dear, you will drink it, will you not?” asked Catherine at last, pleadingly.

But she kept the young woman’s hand tight clasped in hers, so that Catherine looked up at Stacey for a moment with a faint questioning smile. For the first time tears started to his eyes; there was so much of selfless weary beauty in the look she gave him. He nodded, went quickly out to the kitchen, found the scared cook, and presently himself brought in the chocolate, which Mrs. Latimer drank with trembling gulps, Catherine holding the cup.

Then the doctor came and with Catherine’s help put Mrs. Latimer to bed, while Stacey waited below.

At last Catherine came down again and they went out to the car. Her face looked tired and drawn. The strain had been horrible. Stacey himself, who had perforce borne so small a share of it, was ready to drop.

“Thank you,” he said almost timidly after a moment. “I’m sorry not to have been able to do more. It wasn’t fair to you. You did so much.”

“I?” she exclaimed, but she was resting her head against the upholstered back of the seat. “Poor lady!” she murmured then. “So pitifully—broken! It wasn’t only—herself that Marian hurt.”

Catherine gave him a look of sympathy. “Can you sleep, do you think?” she asked.

But at this he sat erect. “I refuse to have you bother your head about me too,” he said sharply. “Yes, I know I can sleep.”

Mr. Latimer and the others interested succeeded in keeping the truth hidden. Officially, even according to the account given by the sensational evening paper, the death was an accident—there had been burglaries, the times were unsafe, there was a wave of crime in Vernon, Marian had been placing a revolver in the drawer of her desk, and all the rest of it. Privately no one believed the story, and the various things that people did believe were too wild to deserve mention. But officially every one believed it. Officially every one in Vernon always believed what he should. This was Vernon’s great strength.

Stacey did not recover easily from the shock. Perhaps it even worked some permanent change in him. For it left him bruised, saddened, yet somehow calmer and cooler. He worked tremendously at the office, and in the days immediately following the tragedy did indeed value his work mostly as a means to temporary forgetfulness. He saw but few people, and only two or three of these willingly, for he found it hard to talk. He was glad enough to see Edwards now and then at the luncheon hour—at least after their first meeting, when, to excuse the manner he simply could not help, Stacey felt obliged to tell him, who came from an outside world, that Marian Price had been an old friend and that he was pretty cut up by her death; which was hard. Yet Edwards’ gruff awkward expression of sympathy was not unpleasant.

Stacey’s memory of Marian was as of something delicate, lovely and frustrated, and it was softened by that final unwonted touch of tenderness she had shown; but he could never quite forgive Marian what she had done to her mother. In this she had been her father’s daughter. Callous toward others, the Latimers! Hard, at bottom.

He went as often as he could to see Mrs. Latimer, or took her out with him into the park. She recovered from the terrible prostration of that first night, even quickly; she regained an adequate composure of manner; and her sensitive receptive mind was intact. She had always had the faculty of true intuition, which is (as opposed to the false intuition that means merely guessing) the faculty of thinking so swiftly that the logical steps along the way are barely brushed by the flying thought, and the conclusion is so quickly reached that to the breathless beholder it appears to have been attained at one leap. This faculty she did not lose. But in her own attitude toward the world she was sadly changed, no longer a strong flexible personality armed with a gentle irony, giving more than she took, unafraid of facts; she had become a weak shaken woman, with no shelter for her sensitive soul. Almost terrified she seemed at times. And it was Stacey who now tried to give her the support she had formerly tried to give him.

He noted one peculiarity that seemed rather horrible to him. For at least two months after Marian’s death Mrs. Latimer could not see her husband enter a room where she was without giving a shudder of revulsion at his presence.

One thing of good Stacey had gained from the tragedy. He knew Catherine now. Not entirely, by any means; but it was as though he had found a key to the locked door of her personality, and had opened the door and stepped inside just a little way. The intense shyness that wrapped her about had nothing to do with self-consciousness; he had always known that. Now he began to understand that the noble quality of her self lay in her very selflessness. She barely thought of herself consciously at all; and thus to have others do so disturbed her. She gave and gave and took nothing. It was through her immense capacity for pity—not a pity whimpering weakly over a wretched world, but a strong useful pity—that one got to know her. She had given so much of her selflessness to Stacey at the time of the catastrophe that she had given of herself, too; she could not now take back what she had given, even if she wished to do so. He was shocked and numbed by what had happened, and she continued instinctively to give him all the quiet lavish help she could. She was giving perhaps more than she knew.

One day she even brought him one of the articles she had written for a London weekly. She was humble about it, but at heart he was even humbler; for, simply worded, with no pretence at decoration, a brief, clearly stated apology for the “Let-us-eat-drink-and-be-merry” attitude of the day, it radiated a gentle warmth of feeling. Afterward she showed Stacey other articles.

Generally he trod very carefully, taking pains to say nothing that might drive this half-held prodigal friend back behind shadowy barriers of reserve. But one Sunday afternoon in October, when they had gone for a walk in the country, and the boys up ahead were plunging deliriously through heaps of dead leaves, he suddenly turned on her.

“Catherine,” he said, “you give so much—always! But you cannot be all selflessness. There must be a hidden self in you that could take a little.”

She gave him a startled look and did not speak. It was as though she had retreated to a great distance. Still she was there. He had thought she might vanish utterly.

“I think it’s a kind of shy maiden-self that you neglect,” he added. “You know next to nothing about it.”

But he was astonished and remorseful to perceive that her lips were trembling and her eyes moist.

“Did I shock you, Catherine?” he exclaimed. “Silly meddler I am! I’ve no business to bother you.”

“No, no,” she returned, “it’s not that! It’s only that you’re so kind.”

“Well,” he remarked helplessly, “if prying into your thoughts can be called kindness . . .” and paused.

“The kindness is in what you do it for,” she said quietly, and they came up with the boys.

Stacey’s intimacy with his father, too, was closer since the tragedy. Mr. Carroll could hardly be expected to understand the strange relationship that had held Marian and Stacey together and apart; he did not even have the necessary facts to go on. But he saw with all his direct clearness the effect of Marian’s sudden death on his son, and was very kind, and tactful as well. He even took obvious pains to avoid discussion of subjects—such as Bolshevism, labor and the Republican Party—on which he perhaps fancied his son did not at heart agree with him. This touched Stacey, but was quite unnecessary. Stacey had no more interest in Bolshevism or the other things than in the Mabinogion.

CHAPTER XXIV

In November a strike of the street-railway employees broke out. The company, which had applied for and obtained a seven-cent fare six months earlier, had now asked for the right to raise it to ten cents. The city council refused; whereupon the company, alleging its inability to carry on at even a modest profit under the existing costs, declared a twenty per cent. cut in wages, and the employees struck. The clash was fierce and there was much violence. The company imported strike-breakers from Chicago, they were mobbed, there were deaths, the militia was called out, and a few empty cars with shattered windows ran occasionally up and down the city streets.

Stacey was not particularly interested, having other things to think about. He barely glanced at the news headlines and smiled ironically as he did so, knowing that Colin Jeffries, who had a controlling interest in the stock of the street-railway company, also virtually owned the evening (Republican) paper and was engaged in many business enterprises with the owner of the morning (Democratic) paper. As for the editorials, he would no more have read them than he would have read the latest novel by Harold Bell Wright. But sometimes his father read them aloud at table in a tone of fierce assent, and thus Stacey learned that they were all about “one hundred per cent. Americanism” and the duty of labor to yield something, just as capital was yielding something.

However, one afternoon Edwards, whom Stacey had not seen for a week, suddenly entered the office.

“Hello!” cried Stacey cordially. “Come in. Where have you been?”—then broke off at sight of the other’s appearance.

Edwards was unshaven and rather dirty, and his eyes glowed darkly in his tense face. He shut the door behind him, then sat down opposite Stacey at the desk.

“All right,” said Stacey. “I hardly know anything about it, haven’t followed it.”

Edwards’ eyes suddenly blazed. “No,” he cried, “of course not! What’s it all matter to you? You’re all right! You’re not your brother’s keeper! It—”

“Now look here,” said Stacey, firmly but pleasantly enough, “cut out the class business, will you? You know that’s not the way you feel about me or you wouldn’t be coming here to see me. I haven’t a doubt but that the men are right in this strike, but the reason I’ve kept off the subject as much as possible is because I don’t see what in the world I can do about it, and I don’t know anything worse than futile sentimental sympathy.”

“I apologize, Carroll,” Edwards returned moodily. “I didn’t mean that, of course. And I’d probably better apologize in advance for anything else I may break loose and say. I haven’t had much sleep lately.”

“Carroll,” said Edwards painfully, “we’re beaten. I mean, on every big thing. There isn’t going to be any change in the rotten system, not for now. There isn’t going to be any revolution. There isn’t going to be a beginning of socialism, all men sharing tasks, each according to his capacity. There’s just going to be the same tyranny there’s always been, the same exploitation of a lot of men by a few. I tell you, I’m broken-hearted!” He paused, his face set.

“Oh, I did and I didn’t! I thought maybe—but now this strike,” he went on sharply. “Six months ago there’d have been a general strike in sympathy. Every workman in the city would have downed tools. Not—now! We’re beaten, I tell you! There are thousands of unemployed, winter’s here, coal costs what you know, the men don’t dare. Beaten! You’ve heard what one of the big employers said openly—that pretty soon the men would be eating out of their hands! And here am I fighting for this puny little thing—that men be doled out enough to exist on! And fighting in vain!”

“Here!” said Edwards, tearing papers from his pocket. “Here are the figures. Here’s what it costs a family of three to live—Government statistics. Here’s what the men were getting. Here’s what they’re to get now if they yield.” He pushed the papers across the table.

Stacey fingered them, but kept his eyes on his friend. “I know,” he said. “I can imagine without studying them. What do you want me to do?”

“I don’t know,” said Edwards nervously. “I’d thought of two or three things. If you were to print the facts—just the facts—with your name signed to them, in one of the papers. . . .”

Stacey smiled bitterly. “Fat chance! How much of a power in this town do you think I am? Don’t you know that Colin Jeffries, who owns the street-railway, controls the papers?”

“Yes, I know that, damn him!” Edwards burst out. “He’s everywhere! You can’t get out from under his shadow.”

“And even if I could get such an article printed, what would it accomplish? When did the public ever budge? Inert mass of sheep! And all the time the papers harping on the idea that the street-railway company can’t pay its stock-holders even a nominal interest on their investment under current conditions.”

“Well,” Edwards fairly shouted, “and if they can’t! Do you know anything about that company? I do. I’ve looked into it with a lawyer. Way over-capitalized. Three millions of water, Carroll,—three cool millions into private pockets! So men must starve, must they, to pay interest on that stock?”

Stacey’s face was grim. “No,” he said shortly, “I hadn’t looked into it, but it doesn’t surprise me. I’ll tell you what I could do,” he said hesitatingly after a moment. “I—er—the only available income I have is what I make here at the office. I could turn over—say two hundred and fifty dollars a month of it to the union. And I might—that is, I don’t know what my sister does with her income—gives most of it away, I fancy—but I dare say she’d put in as much more.”

Edwards stared. “Say,” he said shakily, “that’s decent! I thought you had—well, it’s none of my business. But it wouldn’t be any use, Carroll. Not a hundredth part enough. But—thanks!”

“Oh!” said Stacey deprecatingly, then fell to thinking. “Look here,” he remarked finally, “there’s only one thing I can think of, and it will have to be you to do it rather than I. Also it’s only a faint chance. Now my father is an honest man—set in his beliefs, but honest. And he’s also influential. Colin Jeffries probably defers as much to him as to any one living, because father’s very likely the only thoroughly honest, disinterested friend Jeffries has. Father believes in the principles Jeffries only exploits to make money out of. If you can get him—my father, I mean—on your side, he might take the matter up to Jeffries personally.”

Edwards’ face expressed extreme dislike of the suggestion. “Can’t say I care much for the idea—like begging for what you’ve a right to.”

“I didn’t suppose you would. But I estimate that what you’re out for is to save a living wage for these men—by any means.”

“Yes,” Edwards muttered, “I’d do anything. But how on earth could I swing your father into line?”

“Well,” said Stacey slowly, “come out to the house this evening at eight-fifteen, just when dinner’s over, and talk to him, always about the personal side, the facts of it, show him the figures, and keep away from all discussion of principles! Appeal to his sense of fair play to get him to go down with you to-morrow morning and see the men themselves.”

Stacey made himself very agreeable at dinner that evening. He was keyed up by anticipation, his eyes glowed, and he looked younger. There was an added warmth in the harmony that had been lately achieved in the Carroll house. But Stacey saw Catherine glance at him wonderingly. It wasn’t possible to hide feelings from Catherine.

He caught her alone for a moment on the way to the library. “Now listen!” he said. “You stick by me. Don’t budge from the library. And support me in every way you can.”

Her dark eyes were curious, but her lips curved faintly into a smile—perhaps at his tone of command, that was so unlike his customary tone with her.

He would explain nothing, however; only marched her on down the hall. And a very few minutes later Parker came in to say that a Mr. Edwards had called.

“Oh, yes,” Stacey exclaimed, “he’s a friend of mine! Bring him in, Parker,—or, no, I’ll go get him myself,” and he went out. “Take it easy now, and no principles,” he growled to Edwards, as he piloted him in.

“Father,” Stacey remarked, “this is my friend, Edwards,—was commander of the Legion post, you know. Mrs. Blair, Mr. Edwards.”

“How do you do, sir?” said Mr. Carroll, shaking hands. His face had assumed its keen yet non-committal business-look. Mr. Carroll knew something about Edwards, of course, and disapproved of what he knew, but he was a courteous gentleman in his own house; such a man as Mr. Latimer, artistically conscious of every attitude, could not have expressed the situation more nicely.

“I wanted to say a few words to you, sir, about this strike,” Edwards began, sitting down awkwardly in the chair toward which Stacey had impelled him.

Mr. Carroll did not reply at once. He gnawed at his moustache, his eyes grew harder, and he shot one swift angry glance at Stacey.

Up to now Stacey had been rather pleased with himself; he thought he had engineered things well. It suddenly struck him that, instead, he had made a mess of them. His father was angry with him, and therefore more hostile to Edwards. And Edwards was nowhere near at his best; he was gauche, heavy, impressed by his surroundings—it had never occurred to Stacey that he might be,—and correspondingly resentful. Oh, Lord! Stacey looked across helplessly at Catherine.

She had poured out another cup of coffee and now handed it to the guest. “Will you have sugar, Mr. Edwards?” she asked.

“No—no, thank you!” he replied, startled, and took the cup gingerly. He looked as though he would much rather have refused it had he dared.

Mr. Carroll turned his eyes back to the young man. “I have no connection with the street-railway company, Mr. Edwards,” he said deliberately, choosing his words with care. “On the basis of such information as I have been able to obtain in regard to the strike my sympathies are with the company. I fail to see why capital should have to make all the sacrifices and labor none. But since you—and Stacey—wish it, I shall be glad to hear you state the men’s side of the case. I should think, however, that some official of the street-railway company would be the proper person to hear it.”

Edwards, who had flushed, made a quick angry gesture. But this almost upset the fragile cup that he held; so he was forced into restraint. He drank his coffee hastily before replying.

“Well, sir,” he began then, “Carroll—I mean Stacey—thought if I could give you the facts as I did to him you’d maybe see them our way. I don’t want to talk about principles, sir—”

Edwards glanced wrathfully at Stacey. “Because we wouldn’t agree about them and there wouldn’t be any use in our trying to.” His hand trembled slightly, and the tiny silver spoon rattled against his coffee cup; so he rose and limped over to a table to rid himself of the nuisance once for all.

Catherine leaned forward. “Stacey told me you had been wounded in the war, Mr. Edwards,” she said softly.

He looked toward her. “Yes, ma’am,” he returned, “at Les Eparges. My right leg was rather shot to bits.”

Stacey drew a breath of relief. He hardly thought Catherine was being deliberately tactful; she had spoken impulsively. But the result was excellent. And Edwards in the tone with which he replied to Catherine revealed that old-fashioned attitude of deference toward women just as women, which was also Mr. Carroll’s attitude.

As for Stacey, he said nothing at all. He had that much sense anyway, he told himself. He’d have to face his father later on; for the present he wanted to be as nearly forgotten as possible. So he sat still and commented silently on the shifting fortunes of the battle.

“Have a cigar, Edwards?” asked Mr. Carroll, holding out his case. (Good! There was a touch of something more personal in this.)

Edwards drew his papers from his pocket. “Mr. Carroll,” he said, “I’m not going to talk to you at all about social theories or about what sort of stock it is that the street-railway company wants to pay dividends on.” (“Well, damn it, then, don’t!” cried Stacey internally.) “I only want to show you, in figures, the condition of the employees just as men; what they were getting, what they’re going to get if they accept this cut in wages, what it costs a family of three to live to-day.” And he began to read.

He did not read aloud very well. He stuttered a little over a word now and then. But there was an intensity in his deep voice that lent an odd warmth to the figures about groceries, fuel, wages, and the rest. Mr. Carroll must see that the man was in deadly earnest.

When he had finished reading he stretched out the papers. “Want to see them?” he demanded abruptly.

Mr. Carroll shook his head. He was frowning and chewing at the end of his cigar. “The trouble is,” he began, but with less than his usual firmness, “that you can’t separate facts from principles. Labor—”

Two of the three men started and turned toward her; Stacey had been looking at her already.

But Catherine’s eyes were fixed now on the guest. “Do you mean, Mr. Edwards,” she asked, in a voice that revealed both compassion and scorn, “that the highest wage of any employee would be only forty cents an hour?”

“Yes, ma’am,” said Edwards bitterly, “if they accept the cut in wages.”

“Most are a good deal more than three,” he replied. “About twenty per cent. of the men are unmarried and perhaps bring the average down to three.”

Catherine’s face had an odd expression. Stacey thought she looked like a sorrowful goddess. “Before my husband died,” she said, “we were a family of four. We were living on two hundred and fifty dollars a month, and you thought, Mr. Carroll, that we had to live too sordidly. You will do something?”

Stacey was touched by the mention of Phil. The thought of Phil was with him, almost like a gentle presence, very often. Catherine spoke of him seldom but, when she did so, quite simply and naturally, as now. She must miss him sadly, Stacey thought, and felt grieved for her. But, since it was his instinct to carry through unswervingly anything he had undertaken, he was also exultant, as well as faintly amused at his father, who was being swept away from principles at every turn, simply not permitted to play with them.

“I can’t say I like those statistics,” said Mr. Carroll at last, more to Catherine than to Edwards. Then he turned to the latter. “But I’d have to know more. I’d have to look into things. And then I don’t know what I could do about it; I might do something, I suppose. Confound it! sir,” he exclaimed impatiently, “why didn’t you take this up with some official of the company?”

“I want you to know more, sir,” Edwards returned eagerly. “I’d like it if you’d go down with me and see some of the strikers man to man, get their story.”

Mr. Carroll reflected, frowning. “All right,” he said sharply. “Come to my office to-morrow morning at nine.”

Catherine’s face fairly shone, and Mr. Carroll, looking back at her, relaxed his sternness and leaned over to pat her hand.

He made his adieux clumsily, with too much formality, and Stacey accompanied him down the hall to the door.

“Well,” Edwards remarked, “that’s something, I suppose,—thanks to Mrs. Blair. Precious little help you were, though, Carroll!”

“Oh, yes,” said Stacey cheerfully, “I messed things up properly. But then, look at you! What the devil do you mean by behaving like a resentful commoner at a court function? Go on home, you sulky snob!” he added with a laugh, and pushed his friend out of the door.

His father and Catherine were sitting there in silence, she gazing away with dark abstracted eyes, he frowning slightly and staring down at a closed magazine on which he tapped nervously with his fingers. He looked up and turned to Catherine as Stacey entered.

“No,” Stacey exclaimed promptly, “she wasn’t! Didn’t know a thing about it. It was all my damfoolishness.”

“I see,” said Mr. Carroll, and rose. “I’ll go to bed, I think. Good night.”

But Stacey set his back against the door. “No, sir,” he returned, “let’s have this out. I’ll concede that I was wrong to do this in this way. Now you go ahead and tell me some more things.”

His father stood there, looking at him keenly, antagonistically, judging him. Mr. Carroll’s upper lip was drawn in a little, and there was a harshness about his face. One could see that he had fought hard fights in life and that he was still an adversary to be reckoned with.

“I am not aware,” he began coldly, “of being in my dotage—yet. If anybody wants anything from me the thing for him to do is to come and ask me for it; then if I think he ought to have it he’ll get it. I’ll be damned if I’ll be cosseted and cajoled into a good humor so that something can be wormed out of me.”

Absolutely justified, his father was, Stacey thought helplessly. “You’re perfectly right, sir,” he said, “and I apologize, My only excuse for not being frank—and I admit it’s not good enough—is that I was so confoundedly anxious for you to hear Edwards’ story, and was fool enough to think you might refuse if I asked you to, point-blank.”

For just an instant Stacey glanced away to Catherine and saw with sharp regret that her eyes were full of pain. Why the devil had he let her in for this? Then he looked back at his father.

But Mr. Carroll’s wrath was not assuaged, and when he spoke again Stacey perceived that a long resentment, dangerously repressed, had burst loose finally.

“You take me for a damned fool,” Mr. Carroll went on angrily. “I’m a fool perhaps, but not a damned fool. Do you think I can’t see how you humor me?—the nice, kindly, tolerant spirit you show for my foibles, your ‘poor-dad-he’s-growing-old’ attitude! Superior, sir! Intolerably superior!”

This was pretty bad, and all the worse for the tiny element of truth it contained. “Now look here, dad!” Stacey pleaded. “That’s not so. There isn’t anybody in the world I respect more than I do you. Why—”

“Extraordinary method of showing it you take, then!” snapped his father. “Respect—nothing! At heart you’re a Bolshevist, sir. Well, then, if you are, be one! You’re not consistent. You’re a Bolshevist in theory” (“Oh, Lord! I haven’t got any theories!” Stacey thought, but did not try to say), “a millionaire in practice. I gave you a tidy fortune. You took it, didn’t you? You live here with me in a certain amount of luxury. Well, why do you? Why don’t you go and live in a hut?” He paused, out of breath, glaring at his son.

Stacey was pale; for this hurt. But he was further than before from losing his temper, since now the attack was unjust. To his amazement, and certainly to Mr. Carroll’s as well, it was Catherine who lost her temper—or almost.

“Mr. Carroll!” she cried—and both men, turning suddenly toward her, saw her standing erect, a slim firm figure with a face of angry beauty. “That’s unfair and cruel and not like you! I know that Stacey cares less for money than any one else in Vernon—and it is a shame that it should have to be I to say so. He lived for four years in mud and horror because he hoped it would do some good. It’s wonderful that when he came back and seemed to find that it hadn’t done any good he could keep his sanity. And still he’d go and live like that again if it were of any use. And you accuse him of living here because of the luxuries you give him! He lives here because of his affection for you and because of the affection he thought you had for him. It’s—shameful—what you said!” She ceased and sat down again, her breath coming fast, her lips quivering.

Stacey gazed at her, his heart beating rather quickly; he was overwhelmed with the number of his emotions. He was astounded at the brave magnificent way she had spoken, proud that it was in his cause, deeply touched, and somehow profoundly sad.

As for Mr. Carroll, he looked in a dazed way from Catherine to his son. “There is no excuse for what I—said to you, son,” he said at last. “I don’t suppose you can forgive me. Try to, if you are able.”

Stacey walked over and shook his hand. “Oh—er—shucks, dad!” he muttered. “It’s all right—forgotten.” It was the first time he had ever heard his father apologize to any one for anything.

Mr. Carroll gave his son a strange wistful look of gratitude, then went over to Catherine. “Are you going to let me sit down beside you, Catherine?” he asked. “You’re not going to pack up and leave the house just because your host’s an old fool?”

“No,” she said in a strangled voice, giving him her hand, but keeping her face averted, so that neither he nor Stacey could see it.

“I’m not altogether an old fool, my dear,” he added, patting her hand; then got up again. “Er—a game of pinochle, Stacey?” he suggested.

Stacey nodded, and moved to get the card table. “Sure! I’d like one. But you don’t really think you’ve any chance against me, do you, dad?” he said shakily.

CHAPTER XXV

At breakfast next morning no allusion was made to the promised excursion with Edwards, but Stacey was confident of its success. On this account, as well as on others, he was glad of last night’s storm. For he knew his father. Mr. Carroll might fancy that principles were the foundation of his life; they were not, they were mere dead wood. First and last it was by personal relationships that he was swayed. It was this that gave him his sweetness, his directness, his genius for holding friends, his absolute inability to be impartial. He would have made a very poor judge. As a result of the quarrel he would be unavoidably on Edwards’ side—because it was Stacey’s side.

Mr. Carroll was nearly always gay at breakfast; on this morning he was delightful. But he did not tease Catherine, as he often tried to do. Instead, he joked with the boys, with great detriment to their table manners, and reduced Jackie in particular to a condition that shocked even Carter.

As for Catherine, she seemed to Stacey shyer than usual, more withdrawn. This was natural, he thought. After that splendid outburst in defence of him she must of course retreat hurriedly into herself. Which was rather obtuse of Stacey, since he should surely have known by now that for Catherine giving was not logically followed by taking back, but by further giving. At any rate, despite her silence, he felt a closeness to her, a deep intimacy with her. There was a touch of melancholy at his heart, too; for he felt more than he cared to admit. He did not venture to speak much to Catherine—only a few matter-of-fact words. Ah, well, last evening’s scene had temporarily stripped off too many discreet veils, left emotions too naked; by to-night everything would have become normal again. Yet Stacey did not precisely envisage this certainty with satisfaction.

He motored into town with his father and Catherine, but left them at the door of the Carroll Building and went on to his own office.

He worked that morning with less complete absorption than usual, and at half past twelve went to the lunch-room, hoping to find Edwards.

Edwards was not there, but before Stacey had finished eating he came in, looking radiant. “It’s all right, Carroll,” he said gaily, limping over with a sandwich and coffee. “Your father saw things our way. There’s something pretty fine about him. You can’t help liking him. And then Mrs. Blair, well, she’s just a wonder—the real thing!”

“Oh, he was non-committal, of course! Said he didn’t know whether he could do anything, but he’d try. Remarked that Colin Jeffries was a fair man, one of the fairest he knew, also a great citizen! And I was a lamb, Carroll, swallowed that without even a gulp! So it’s pretty clear he’s gone to take the thing up with Jeffries—or will go.”

Stacey considered his friend curiously. Extraordinary, this thinking in classes! Edwards did not think of capitalists as men; he thought of them as parts of a whole, which was capital. It was only capital he thought about really, as something with an existence of its own. So he took it for granted that if you swung over one capitalist to your side you could swing the whole, just as when you pulled back the lever of an engine you set the entire machine in motion. Neat, very,—but not true. Stacey himself, though he had suggested the scheme, was far from confident that his father could bring Colin Jeffries around, because Stacey saw the problem as a personal problem.

“Well,” he said soberly, “I hope father can pull it off. Come on up to the office.”

“Mrs. Blair is a corker!” Edwards announced suddenly. “The best ever! Do you raise many like her in your caste?”

“Well, I’m glad of that. I should hate to find some real reason for the existence of your plutocratic bunch.”

“Oh, you make me tired!” said Stacey wearily. “You talk like a child. At heart you have a kind of idea that the people I know are different from you. You resent it, but you have a secret feeling that they’re superior—Olympians. That’s because—”

But at this point in his attack the telephone bell rang and he lifted the receiver.

“That you, Stacey?” said his father’s voice, and Stacey knew at once that the attempt had failed. “I saw Colin Jeffries about that matter, had a long talk with him. But I couldn’t budge him. Said he’d do anything else in the world for me, but that in the matter of this strike he couldn’t even hear of a compromise. Said he’d be going back on every principle he had if he did. That it had come to a show-down. Was business to be run as an efficient competitive proposition with moderate financial reward, or was it to become a charitable institution with the investors as donators? He made a strong case for his stand—unanswerable logically. All the same . . .”

“Well, I’ve heard those statistics from Edwards and I’ve seen some of the men. It’s not just that they should have to live like that.”

“Said he was sorry for the men and their wives, very, but that he had to think of the stock-holders also. That they, too, were men and women, though you couldn’t get an employee to see it.”

“Neat point,” Stacey remarked. “Jeffries owns two-thirds of the common himself. I’ve seen the list of the other stock-holders. There is one widow among them. I’d be willing to defray her losses myself.”

“I’m sorry, son.” (Mr. Carroll’s voice was regretful.) “I’d like to have got this through for you—and because I think it’s right, though of course my convictions on the labor and capital situation in general remain unchanged.”

“I know it, dad,” said Stacey. “Edwards will know that too. Thanks, just as much as if you’d brought it off. Good-bye. See you at dinner.”

He hung up the receiver, then looked across at Edwards. “Nothing doing,” he said, his face impassive.

Edwards’ face had flushed a dull crimson, and his jaw was set, so that there was an effect of massive squareness about his head. His eyes glowed.

“Yes,” he replied thickly, “so I judged. Bombs, Carroll, nice little hand-grenades,—that’s what’s wanted!”

“I agree,” said Stacey coolly. “It would be a pleasure to toss one at Jeffries; but that’s no use. Never was. The reaction swings you back to below where you started.”

“You’re so damned cold-blooded about it!” Edwards cried furiously. “Can’t you put yourself—”

“Shut up!” said Stacey harshly. “I’m twice as angry as you are—and I’m going to take a hand in this somehow.”

And, in truth, an observer studying the two men carefully would have ended by believing Stacey the more dangerous. With only a little extra tautness in the muscles of his face to alter his appearance, there was yet something hard and ruthless in his expression. It was quite clear that if, as Stacey had learned, nothing of his fanciful, fastidious, early self had really vanished, neither had anything vanished of that embittered, stony, cold-and-passionate self he had brought back from the war. This morning while he was at work his thoughts about the strike and about Mr. Carroll’s undertaking had been haphazard, interrupted by warm memories of the scene at home the night before. Now Stacey’s whole mind was concentrated in a kind of chilly fierceness on the single problem of how he could force Colin Jeffries to yield.

“It’s got to be personal fighting—no principles; they’re no good,” he thought. “Now what handle have I got? What do I know about Jeffries?”

In response to this way of putting it, a casual winter-night’s memory flashed into his mind. Of course! He threw up his head and laughed unpleasantly.

“I’ve got a sort of half-idea, Edwards,” he observed. “Maybe it will work out. Now you run along and let me think it over. See you to-morrow.”

Stacey sat there, reflecting intensely, for perhaps a quarter of an hour. Then he got up, went out, and walked over to the building in which Colin Jeffries had his office.

The millionaire’s large outer-office was full of men waiting. They sat singly or in groups and talked in low tones. Some of them, men prominent in one business or another, Stacey recognized and nodded to. He gave his card to a young man—some sort of secretary, probably—who promised to take it in to Mr. Jeffries but said he feared there wasn’t the slightest chance of seeing him this afternoon except by appointment.

Less than ten minutes later the secretary returned, obviously impressed, to say that Mr. Jeffries would see Mr. Carroll now; then conducted him to the financier’s private office.

“Come in, Stacey,” said Mr. Jeffries cordially, getting up to shake hands. “Sit down, won’t you?”

This being called by his first name amused him. It must be meant as a kingly compliment by Mr. Jeffries, since he and Stacey had not met above half a dozen times—or perhaps it was to aid in the effect of cordiality. But there were many other things besides amusement in Stacey’s mind. He was thinking swiftly, taking stock of his adversary, all in the brief interval while he accepted and lighted a courteously proferred cigarette.

This cordiality now,—it was not a warmth radiating from inner good will; it was external, a fire built on snow. He felt the man as cold—perhaps cruel, too. If so, cold even in his cruelty. Stacey felt aversion, something in that personality was rasping to him; but he was far from feeling contempt. He recognized that he was encountering a strong and steely character, not one—like most—only apparently strong. Not a touch here of the business-man as shown in romances or movies, no nervous movement of papers, no abstracted air of meditation on vast enterprises. Mr. Jeffries did not even say that he could spare Stacey a few minutes of his time; he was as leisurely as though he were lounging at a club. Yet the man was intensely busy from morning to night, and at this moment his outer-office was crowded with those waiting to see him.

“It was about the street-railway strikers that I wanted to speak to you, Mr. Jeffries,” said Stacey, blowing out his match. (There had only been that much of a pause.)

A look of regret came over the millionaire’s face. “I’m sorry, Stacey,” he replied, shaking his head slowly, “but there’s nothing I can do. I explained my position to your father this morning.”

“Yes, I know you did,” Stacey continued carefully. “But you and he are so much alike” (they were alike superficially; Stacey disclaimed almost passionately that there was any deep likeness) “that I feel sure you must both see this trouble as a matter of principle, as labor versus capital, as a strike,—not as men striking. The men can’t live on the wages you’re offering to pay them, Mr. Jeffries. Can’t—live.”

“And the company can’t live and give them any better ones,” returned Mr. Jeffries quietly.

Stacey did not express his opinion of the company’s right to life. He attended quietly to what Mr. Jeffries said. All this was no use, anyway.

“There’s more in this than you see, Stacey. It’s a test case—an unfortunate one, I grant you; test cases are rarely the ones a man would choose. It’s come to a question of whether business organized on private capital can exist at all. If it can’t we’d better know it at once; if it can then it will have to be run on the basis of a decent adjustment between receipts and disbursements.”

Stacey, quite unmoved by this, shook his head. “I don’t see how this can be a test case,” he observed. “Suppose you win,—it’s a paper victory only. Neither these men nor any others can work for you permanently at a wage that won’t support them and their families. Know what I think?” he demanded, gazing sharply at the older man, “I rather think the whole thing’s a threat held over the head of the city council.”

Mr. Jeffries laughed. “That’s shrewd of you, Stacey,” he remarked. “But, if so, you’ll admit it’s not very successful.”

Stacey, wary because of the note of flattery, continued to gaze at him. How keen the man was! Not once had he said: “You young men who’ve come back with socialistic ideas . . .” He had met Stacey with apparent candor and with no touch of tolerant superiority. His manner proclaimed equality,—but perhaps just faintly over-proclaimed it.

“You won’t even consider yielding,” Stacey asked, “so that these men can support their families—now—in winter?”

“I can’t, my boy. It’s to your credit, though, that you take the thing so much to heart. I admire you for it.”

The “my boy” and the admiration were under the circumstances a little too much for Stacey. The muscles of his face hardened almost imperceptibly, and he leaned back in his chair.

The other’s expression did not alter, no glint of amusement shone in his eyes; but he considered Stacey intently. “I’m sorry for that,” he returned after a moment, “but I guess I can only say: Go to it! I know it will be a fair fight, anyway.”

“Mr. Jeffries,” Stacey inquired, “do you remember a young woman named Ethel Wyatt?”

“Yes,” replied the financier, his expression unchanged. “She was governess to our children for a time. There were reasons which made us let her go. Why?”

That last sentence was the only hint of weakness. Stacey felt an evil exultation. However, his face was impassive. “I was told in confidence,” he observed quietly, “that she left of her own accord because you hid in her bathroom and otherwise persecuted her.”

A faint color showed on Mr. Jeffries’ high cheek-bones, and his eyes hardened until they became like polished steel, but when he spoke his tone was quiet and firm, as before. Stacey reluctantly admired him.

“That’s not a pretty story,” he said. “I shan’t even trouble to deny it. May I ask why you repeat it to me?”

Mr. Jeffries considered him fixedly. “That seemed to be what you were driving at. I could hardly believe that I understood your meaning correctly. We’ll waive all the moral aspects of such blackmail—”

Mr. Jeffries frowned at the insolence of the interruption. Only from a certain tautness in his face could Stacey perceive that he was very angry, so well did he keep himself under control. “Do you really fancy,” he demanded, his words like sharp staccato taps of a hammer, “that any one, any one of any account, in this city is going to believe such a story?”

“Not officially, of course,” Stacey replied. “Being the power you are, Mr. Jeffries, you could go out in the street and commit publicly almost any crime short of murder, and officially even the witnesses wouldn’t admit that you’d done it. But privately most people will love to believe such a story.”

“Oh, yes,” said Stacey indifferently, “or I wouldn’t use it. But, to tell you the truth, I haven’t the slightest interest in the story. It doesn’t even amuse me. I merely see it as a possible weapon.”

Mr. Jeffries continued to gaze at him sharply. “Do you know anything about this young woman, Ethel Wyatt?” he inquired presently, his voice frigid.

“Then you doubtless know the sort of person she has proved to be. She has been the mistress of Ames Price, among others.”

“Oh,” Stacey exclaimed scornfully, “let’s not go in for rhetoric! There’s no dictograph in the room. Let’s not be benevolent millionaire and returned hero deserving well of his country!”

“Very well!” snapped Mr. Jeffries, his cheeks slightly flushed. “You’d take this girl’s word against mine?”

Mr. Jeffries said nothing for a moment, merely regarding Stacey intently. “How you do dislike me, don’t you?” he asked then. He had quite recovered his calm.

Stacey raised his eyebrows. “That has nothing to do with it,” he remarked coldly.

“Hasn’t it? You can say that and still be ready to smirch my good name and make my wife miserable?”

Stacey drew himself up. “What’s a man’s smirched name or a weeping wife compared with a man who’s under-nourished and a wife who can’t buy proper clothes for her children?” he demanded bitterly. “It’s useless! You can’t see why I’m doing this thing. For you I must have some other motive. Well, I haven’t.”

“And you’re going to use this story unless I give in on the strike—is that the idea?”

“Yes. I don’t say I’m going to throw it around broad-cast. Perhaps. I shall anyway tell it to my father. If you are a man and not just a popular legend, that ought to hit you almost as hard as the other thing. Because if I were you and had a friend like my father, I should want to keep him.”

For the first time Mr. Jeffries withdrew his eyes from his enemy and looked away, frowning. “You’ll hurt him a good deal,” he said quietly. “When are you going to tell him?”

“Just a minute!” said the older man sharply. “I suppose you understand that you force me to play the same kind of game. I shall of course endeavor to learn where—and how—you have known this girl, since I’ve no doubt you got the story direct from her.”

“Oh, I should,” said Stacey indifferently. “It might prove discreditable. Also I should fancy that what I am doing is a criminal offence. I am really sorry for one thing,—to have taken up so much of your time,” he added sincerely.

Mr. Jeffries considered him grimly. “You have peculiar compunctions,” he observed.

Stacey went back to work. He was not particularly satisfied with the interview and he felt rather soiled mentally. The threat of the story, not the story itself, was what he had wanted to use. Once set going, the story would only be punishment, and he was not at all interested in punishment.

But that evening during dinner Mr. Carroll was called to the ’phone, and when he returned he was jubilant.

“Good news, Stacey!” he cried, slapping his son on the back. “Colin Jeffries has come around. Said you came up to see him and repeated the things I’d said, told him how strongly I felt about it (why didn’t you tell me?), and afterward he got to thinking things over till at last he said: ‘To hell with principles! It’s been my experience that if Edward Carroll wants a thing done the thing must be right.’ The strike’s off. It’ll be in the papers to-morrow.”

Mr. Carroll settled himself again in his chair and beamed. As for Catherine, she uttered a cry of joy, then suddenly looked across at Stacey. But he avoided her eyes. However, though he felt smirched, he also felt a fierce exultation.

Mr. Carroll leaned back in his chair. “Another thing Colin said, Stacey,” he remarked proudly, “was that you were wasted on a job like architecture, that you had—let’s see!—a concentrated directness of purpose that would have got you most anywhere in business. I was to be sure to tell you that.”

Stacey had looked up at this, startled. By Jove! the man was a good sport! Stacey was filled with admiration, and it struck him that he had been making Edwards’ mistake, had been seeing Colin Jeffries as a symbol, not just as an individual. Always this haze of legend hanging about everything! You had to tear it off.

Later, when he had gone upstairs to bed, he fell to meditating on the whole affair. How incongruously people and things were tangled! The great street-railway strike had come to an abrupt end because a year ago he, Stacey Carroll, had run off to a disreputable road-house with a strange reckless girl.

The entire front page of the paper next morning was occupied by Mr. Jeffries’ statement. It was a masterpiece. It began by recapitulating the facts—the doubled and tripled cost of material, the city council’s refusal to allow a ten-cent fare, the company’s dilemma,—to the accompaniment of persuasive figures. The beau geste that followed was all the more effective for their convincingness. There were other things than gain in this world. There were human beings. We were our brothers’ keepers. (Stacey thought of Edwards’ remark, and grinned.) We owed them a right to a decent existence even at the cost of sacrifice to ourselves. A corporation was not a soulless machine. It had not, save in theory, any existence of its own. (Stacey nodded approval. Good point!) It was simply a group of individuals banded together, in accordance with the law, for the prosecution of a legitimate business and for the public service. The Vernon Street-Railway Company was such a group; and the members of this group now, after a careful investigation of conditions, made by themselves and by disinterested friends (here complimentary mention was made of Mr. Carroll’s generous initiative), felt that they could not at present, with harsh winter already here, require their employees to live on a reduced wage. This decision was taken though it meant not even a nominal profit but a considerable monthly deficit for the company. Every effort at retrenchment would be made. Economy would be rigid. The service might fall off slightly, but the public were prayed to be lenient, remembering that the company was failing in its business duty in order to accomplish a larger human duty.

Stacey felt no disdain,—only amusement and admiration. Mr. Jeffries’ telephoned message of last evening had revealed the man as not afraid to face the truth squarely. He might live in an atmosphere of magniloquent lies; that was because they served his purpose. At least, he was not himself deceived by them.

Edwards was waiting for Stacey at the office. “By the Lord!” he cried, waving the paper in one hand and wringing Stacey’s hand with the other, “you did it! Damned if you didn’t! Now tell me: what did you do?”

“Why, I just emphasized the things father had already said and pointed out how much my father’s loyalty to Jeffries meant,” said Stacey innocently.

Edwards stared at him. “The hell you did!” he exclaimed. “Carroll, you did some sort of dirty work—awfully dirty work, I’ll bet!” And he grinned with delight.

“Now look here, Edwards,” said Stacey soberly, “if you ever suggest that to any one else, or if you even let on that I had anything to do in this business at all, you’ll make things awfully unpleasant for me. Honestly! That’s all I can tell you.”

“Can’t. Can’t possibly. I’ve got to get to work. Precious little I’ve done these last days.”

Nevertheless, Edwards lingered. His jubilant mood had passed now, and he looked at Stacey with a kind of awkward wistfulness.

“I say, Carroll!” he blurted out finally, “you remember that night of the Legion meeting a year and more ago?” Stacey nodded. “Well, then I felt the better man of us two—no, I don’t mean better—saner, perhaps. You were”—he puzzled—“sort of twisted.”

Edwards continued after a moment, but with a shyness that in his rough rugged personality was appealing. “Now you’ve—got something, some solution for things. I don’t know what it is exactly, but there’s something. I just wanted you to know that I recognized it—that’s all.”

“That’s awfully decent of you,” returned Stacey quietly, “but I don’t think I’ve got anything really—any solution, I mean. Perhaps less than ever.”

Edwards shook his head. “Tell you what I think it is,” he observed. “You’ve come to see people as on a wrong track—struggling hard for things that don’t count, food and clothes more than they need, automobiles, fine houses, all things of existence that don’t get them anywhere,—totally without desire for life. That’s an easy enough point of view to take intellectually, but you feel it, really live it yourself. You live in a palace, but you’d as soon live in a hut. Because you don’t care any more for those futile things. Except,” he added, “when they’re the bare essentials—as in this strike. Then you turn hard as flint in your will to get them—for other people. Thanks, you know. Thanks awfully! ’Bye!” He stumped out, waving his hand as though to ward off an answer.

Stacey was touched. Edwards was an idealist, for all his rude indomitable spirit and his contact with the rough working world; Stacey knew that. Yet it was pleasant to have a friend who thought better of you than you deserved.

There was one corollary to the strike. Four days later a grateful city council voted to allow a flat ten-cent fare. So now every one was satisfied—except the public, who had exactly what they merited, Stacey thought. He laughed heartily, wondering a little whether Colin Jeffries had not all along counted on this possibility.

CHAPTER XXVI

Christmas a year ago had been a ghastly festival for Stacey, that he had gone through with somehow, his face stiffened into a fixed smile, his voice saying mechanical things, while within him only one emotion had been alive—the fierce, dizzy, dangerous craving to get away, from this, from everything and every one. And it could not have been much gayer for the others. Mr. Carroll had watched his son apprehensively, Jimmy Prout, too, had fallen below his customary debonair form, and even Julie, who, though more intelligent than people gave her credit for being, was not subtle, had a grave anxious air. Also the thought of Phil’s recent death and of Catherine grieving in that lonely squalid house hung over all of them. Only Junior had been quite himself. He had in truth been the life of the party.

Christmas this year was very different—Christmas Eve, especially. There was not quite the old exuberance; that could never return in this grayer sadder world,—or perhaps it was merely that Julie and Stacey and Jimmie were grown-up now. But there was a genial friendly warmth in the atmosphere. And then there were three children this year. They chattered and laughed and stamped impatiently in the long hall that led from the library to the big drawing-room where the tree was being prepared, and when at last the drawing-room doors were thrown open and the brilliant tree was displayed all three gave a howl of joy that would have satisfied even Dickens.

Mr. Carroll was extraordinarily good on such occasions. He delivered the presents—not too slowly, not too rapidly—from the great pile about the base of the tree, with a pleasant easy grace and sometimes a little speech. His own gifts he laid aside in a corner, to open later. They made an imposing heap, too; for many people outside of the family delighted to remember Mr. Carroll. Women, especially. He had great success with women and remained quite unspoiled by it, accepting it with apparent unconsciousness, or as a matter of course, as an aristocrat accepts his position. Old wives of old friends, young wives of friends’ sons, daughters of friends, spinsters to whom he had been kind,—he stirred all of them to liking. Perhaps it was Mr. Carroll’s good looks or his grace of manner or his goodness of heart or his youthful spirit or all of them together—Stacey did not know; but he recognized his father’s fascination and looked with affectionate amusement at the growing pile of prettily wrapped gifts. But it did not occur to Stacey that he himself had inherited that attractiveness to women; for he had inherited the unconsciousness of it along with the trait.

The three boys were making a tremendous racket, Julie was flushed and talkative, Jimmy Prout, a colored paper cap on his good-looking head, was lolling easily in his chair and drawing discordant wails from a toy accordion. Only Catherine seemed subdued. She sat near Julie, whom she liked warmly, and smiled and spoke quietly at times, but there was a faint tremulousness about her lips and a sensitiveness, as to pain, in the look of her eyes, that Stacey, who caught quickly the slightest change in Catherine, perceived clearly. Perhaps it was her shyness in all this confusion. Stacey did not know. She had not seemed quite herself of late.

The party broke up finally. Julie took her husband and her delirious son home, and Mr. Carroll and Stacey were left with Catherine and her two boys. Jackie, exhausted with happiness, sat on his mother’s lap and played sleepily with a mechanical mouse; Carter leaned against Stacey’s knee; Mr. Carroll sat, relaxed, in a chair near his gifts, which he showed no eagerness to open. The tree was lifeless, all its little colored candles extinguished, and the floor was strewn with ribbon and tissue-paper. The room held the quiet sadness that broods over a festival that is finished.

Catherine spoke first, setting Jackie on his feet and rising. “Thank you, Mr. Carroll, for everything,” she murmured. “I cannot—express how good you have been. And you, Stacey.”

The men had risen, too. “Why, my dear girl,” Mr. Carroll returned, “you’ve given us far more happiness than we you.”

She shook her head. “I must take the boys up now,” she said. “I’ve promised, as it’s Christmas Eve, to stay with them just for once while they undress.”

“Well, sir,” said Stacey gaily, when he was left with his father, “aren’t you going to open all those bundles?”

“Presently! Presently!” Mr. Carroll replied. “I’ll carry them up to my study.”

His father shook his head. “There’s something better than that waiting for us,” he remarked, with a smile. “In the dining-room. A bottle of Pol Roger and some sandwiches and so forth. Come along!”

“Well, rather!” Stacey exclaimed. “What a happy thought! I’m starved, too,—to say nothing of my thirst. You never eat anything at dinner in the excitement of this sort of thing.”

He wondered a bit that his father had not suggested their waiting for Catherine, then understood suddenly that this was a handsome tribute to himself, an effort to express wordlessly that they two, father and son, were close friends who needed no one else to help them achieve intimacy. But the first thing Mr. Carroll did was to prepare carefully and set aside a plate of good things to eat. “For Catherine,” he explained. Then, with a boyish smile at Stacey, he took the bottle from the cooler, uncorked it, and poured the hissing pale-gold wine into the delicate flaring glasses.

“Aren’t you ashamed to violate the laws of your country in this way?” asked Stacey.

“I’m not doing that,” Mr. Carroll returned. “When it comes to whiskey I do some considerable violating, but this champagne has been in my cellar for years. To your health, son!”

They talked, like the good friends they were, in an easy desultory way while they sipped the wine and ate a little. But all at once Mr. Carroll became silent, then suddenly looked across at his son.

It was an odd speech, but the oddest thing about it was the tone, which was not rough like the words, but pleading, almost cajoling. Mr. Carroll might have been saying: “Do me a favor, won’t you?”

But his father was filling Stacey’s glass, and, when he had finished doing this, took more time than seemed necessary to replace the bottle in the cooler and adjust the napkin about its neck. And even then he did not reply at once.

“Well,” he said at last, with an obvious effort, and not looking at his son, “I mean to say—why the devil don’t you ask Catherine to marry you?”

Stacey, who had lifted his glass, started so that some of the yellow liquid spilled over upon the table-cloth. He leaned back in his chair, amazed and shocked.

“Where will you find any one who’s shown herself as good and sweet and courageous?” Mr. Carroll went on, almost belligerently, as though Catherine’s merits were in question.

“Nowhere,” Stacey replied soberly. It was abhorrent to him to see his deepest emotion, which he hardly admitted even to himself, spilled over the table, like the wine.

“Phil is dead,” Mr. Carroll answered gravely. “We have all felt his loss. He was a noble character. And you were his closest friend—”

“Just for that he would trust Catherine to you gladly. It would not be he to stand between you.”

“No,” Stacey said in a stifled voice, “I suppose not. It is not Phil, but— Please, sir!” he begged.

His father nodded. “Pretty cheeky of me, I admit, son,” he said gruffly. “Wouldn’t blame you if you’d grown angry, but you understand how I mean it—er—”

“Well,” said Mr. Carroll, rising, “I suppose I’d better get those presents of mine and open them. There’ll be a lot of notes to write in reply.”

Stacey followed him back to the littered drawing-room, mechanically almost, because he did not know what else to do. “Want any help, sir?” he asked.

“No, thanks,” said his father, his arms full of bundles. “I’ll be down again after a while.” And he went out.

Stacey, left alone, stared after him, then walked restlessly down the hall to the library. It was painful to him that his father should have divined his feelings. But this was not the worst. The worst was that, if his father had understood him, so, assuredly, had Catherine. This grieved Stacey deeply. He had been so careful, he thought; he had never meant to let her see what he felt for her. But she did know. Of course she knew! How stupid he had been! No wonder he found her changed! He could see it all now. His father, it seemed, believed that Catherine could care for Stacey as he for her; but Stacey knew better. She was shocked and saddened by her discovery, uncertain what to do—whether to go away or not, generously anxious not to give pain, all her peace of mind gone. Poor Catherine! Stacey was furious with himself. But this did no good—not the least bit. He shook off his anger impatiently. What was to be done about it? That was the point. How without putting things into words—which always made them worse—was he to let Catherine know that she could count on him, that he would be merely the friend she wanted him to be? He was puzzling over it when she entered the room.

She looked startled when she saw that he was there alone, and paused just inside the door as though half inclined to retreat. It hurt Stacey keenly that she should be afraid of him—and with reason. He had risen and stood facing her, but across the room from her.

“Won’t you—come in?” he asked. “Or would you rather go somewhere else—the dining-room? There’s luncheon ready for you in there.”

She shook her head. “No,” she answered, “and I’m not hungry.” But she did not come farther into the room, and, though she smiled waveringly, Stacey saw the expression of pain—or perhaps fear—in her eyes.

“Catherine,” he began in a low voice, after a moment, “why is it so hard—and dangerous—to be frank?”

“Ought it to be either?” she replied gently. She looked at him steadily as she spoke, but the expression on her face was odd and troubled. There was compassion in it, though; he felt that strongly. Of course! A generous emotion would always be dominant in Catherine.

He came a little nearer to her. “Catherine,” he said, “I have not meant ever to—” then broke off. It was worse to say things than to leave them unspoken, and she would understand them anyway. He tried desperately to call the whole subject off. “Oh,” he remarked, with a positively sepulchral gaiety, “Christmas is too emotional! We’re good friends, aren’t we? and that’s all that matters.”

But she continued to gaze at him in that same odd manner. The very pose of her body made her seem like a creature at bay.

And suddenly Stacey’s thoughts were swept away like so much rubbish by a wave of sure emotion. He took a step toward Catherine, stretching out his hands impulsively, and all at once she was in his arms, trembling and weeping, her lips raised to his.

“Ah, Stacey, didn’t you know I loved you?” she murmured presently. “Your father knew.”

She drew a little away from him now and made him sit down beside her on the divan.

“I think,” she said gently, holding his hand against her cheek, “that men can hardly ever think in facts; they must think in patterns; and anything that will not fit into a pattern they find wrong. But I want to tell you the truth. I have always loved you, Stacey, always! It was not disloyalty. I am sure Phil knew. I loved you and him. It was different. I can’t make you understand.”

Stacey, very shaken and confused, and not understanding anything save (humbly) that this was giving on a scale beyond what was credible, drew her to him and kissed her hot face.

“Aha!” he interrupted, laughing unsteadily, “now who’s thinking not like an individual but like the whole female sex?” And at this she, too, laughed a little.

They sat there, close together, scarcely speaking. But it came over Stacey in a rush that in his love for Catherine there was a touch of what he had felt for Marian and something more—far more! Truth, fact. It was complete. This was reality. There was nothing left out.

“Catherine,” he cried, “you are not only a grown woman; you are a little girl, too. And so I’m not afraid of you any longer—I always was, a little, you know. Now I’m not.”

“That’s odd,” she said shyly, “because I—have also been afraid of you, a little.”

“But really? On account of my temper, I suppose. You’re right. I’ve a rotten temper,” he said remorsefully.

She smiled. “No, not on account of your temper. I think,” she explained, grave now, “it was the—the serenity you have achieved, Stacey dear.”

He drew away to stare at her, but before he could speak the door of the room opened and Mr. Carroll entered, then paused abruptly.

Catherine saw him first and hurried to his side, clasping his hand in both of hers and laying her head against his shoulder.

Mr. Carroll reached out his other hand to grasp Stacey’s and gazed at his son with shining eyes.

“Mind, my dear!” he replied. “Isn’t it exactly what I’ve hoped for?” And he bent over and kissed her cheek, then made her sit down beside him on the divan, while Stacey stood a little way off, looking at them.

“Er—where are you thinking of living?” Mr. Carroll asked presently in a carefully matter-of-fact voice, while he slowly clipped off the end of a cigar.

Stacey flashed a swift questioning glance at Catherine. “Why,” he remarked then deliberately, “what with the scarcity of houses and all, we were rather thinking of staying on here.”

“Well,” said Mr. Carroll, “if you will, you will, I suppose.” But he had paused to light his cigar before speaking, and it had taken him rather longer than usual.

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The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Lonely Warrior

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PART I