“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!”
And: “We’re so glad!” said Catherine.
They pushed him into their flat, through the dining-room, into the sitting-room, and plumped him down in an easy chair. A table stood beside it, with a pitcher and glasses. Ice tinkled as the table was jostled.
“Sauterne cup,” Phil explained breathlessly. “?‘Gather ye rose-buds’ and so forth. Only a short time left, you know. Sole subject of conversation in our great republic. Here! Drink! ‘Drink for your altars and your fires!’ I mean to say: ‘Drink, for once dead you never—’ oh, no, that isn’t it!” And he broke out laughing.
Catherine was calmer, or anyway more static. She had sat down on an ottoman, elbows on knees, chin in hands, and was gazing up at Stacey. But her face, too, glowed with pleasure.
Stacey was smiling faintly. He looked from one to the other and said to himself that they were both just the same as four and a half years since, for all that Phil looked older and more worn and even a little thinner.
“You’re both awfully good to me,” he said.
“We’re awfully noisy!” exclaimed Phil remorsefully, sitting down. “We forget that you’re tired.”
Stacey lit a cigarette. “I’m not tired, Phil,” he remarked. “I never get tired nowadays. Nothing like military service for keeping one fit, you know,” he added drily. “And I’m gladder to see both of you than any other two people in the world.” He spoke with an effort. “You both all right? Everything going well? The children?”
“Out at their aunt’s house in the country,” replied Philip, a look of perplexity coming over his face.
There was a pause.
Then suddenly Catherine spoke, haltingly, with the way she had of being unused to words, but earnestly. “What does it—do to a man, Stacey? As much as—all that?”
He sighed in relief. “Wipes him out, Catherine,” he replied in an emotionless voice. “Replaces him with some one else. Good thing that you saw. Because I couldn’t possibly keep up the bluff. I can’t pretend with you two.”
“Nor with any one else,” said Catherine.
“Nor with any one else.”
Philip laughed. “Well, then,” he declared, “we have with us to-day a brand-new friend!”
But Catherine was clearly going to have things over and done with. “You mean,” she said courageously, “that you’re—glad, a little—to see us, but not—”
“Not the way I ought to be. Only in a vague uneasy dead way. Rotten, isn’t it? And brutal. And bound to hurt your feelings. But what can you expect? If I were to see a man cut in two by a bus on the Avenue I shouldn’t feel anything at all except a little distaste. There you have it. Pretty, isn’t it?”
“But the truth,” said Catherine, her eyes shining.
“Yes,” Stacey admitted. “There’s that to be said for it.”
Philip Blair tugged at his short blond moustache and stared at his friend wistfully. “You don’t hurt me, Stacey,” he said at last. “And it’s not true that you’re not fond of us. If it were true you wouldn’t have been so honest. How do I know what they’ve done to you? You’re all—seared over. Had to be, I suppose, or die. You’ll come back to us. Now tell us about all the outside things. First with the English.”
“I was with them, first as an N. C. O., then as a lieutenant, up to June, 1917. Then I transferred to our—”
“Hold on! Hold on! You got the D. S. O. How?”
“Yes, the D. S. O. On the Somme, at Bazentin-le-Grand, for going out with ten men and cleaning up a machine-gun nest. I transferred—”
“Damn it all!” said Phil, “is that the best you can do with it? How did you do it?”
Stacey shook his head impatiently. “And then,” he went on, “as I said, I transferred to the American army and was made a captain. And I got the D. S. C. ‘for cool leadership and conspicuous bravery in action.’?”
A sudden change came over Stacey’s face. It woke, as it were, to life—but to sinister life.
“I’ll tell you 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.
“What a—what a ghastly blunder!” Philip Blair murmured.
Catherine said nothing.
“That’s what war is,” Stacey replied. “One blunder after another. The side which makes the most blunders loses. A trite thought, but true.”
“Then the Germans made the most?”
“Oh, by far!”
“Strange! For a while they seemed invincible—machine-perfect.”
Stacey lit a fresh cigarette. “It was the legend they threw out. They might have won perhaps if they hadn’t grown to believe in it themselves,” he remarked, almost indifferently.
He laid his cigarette down suddenly and smiled. “Come!” he said, with a hard cheerfulness, “I’ll tell you about something pleasant—the reason I’m here only now, the reason I didn’t get my ‘majority,’ the reason they packed me off to Italy after the Armistice, the one thing I ‘did in the Great War’ that I’ll tell my son about. It was in the Argonne, and I was in command of a battalion—had been for a long time. We were in a fairly isolated position. You know what the Argonne was—woods, lightly held as to numbers by the enemy, careful, oh, so careful, machine-gun nests everywhere! We’d had terrible losses but had plugged on through, little by little. Paused at last. Sat still for about a week. Being bombarded in a desultory fashion, but comfortable enough—comparatively. This was November. Well, on November tenth, in the morning, I learned something that I hadn’t any business to learn,—that the Armistice was coming absolutely. On November tenth at 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.”
He leaned back and lit still another cigarette.
“And do you know what people are going to say to you?” asked Catherine in an odd voice. “They’re going to say: ‘Stacey, you smoke too much.’?”
Suddenly she buried her head in her hands and burst out sobbing.
Both men started, and Philip half rose, then sat down again, pulling his moustache and considering her helplessly. Stacey gazed at her with a kind of grim sadness, as if from an immense distance.
“Forgive me!” she said at last, controlling herself and wiping her eyes. “It—it isn’t because you’re bitter, Stacey,” she went on wearily after a moment, choosing her words with difficulty, “and, oh, not at all because you feel—burned out and unaffectionate. It’s—Phil, you tell him. I can’t talk.”
“It’s because Catherine is tired,” said Phil simply. “With all that you’ve been through, it would be too much to ask you to sympathize with what she’s been through. But, infinitely less than your experience, that’s been a lot, too. She always looked at things squarely—more squarely than I. And what are you going to do when the truth you’re seeking comes marching at you with great steps from a long way off and shows itself a bleak brutal thing?”
Stacey gazed at his friend with intellectual sympathy at least.
Phil went on slowly. “We believed in the war, too. Perhaps not quite so ardently as you, but we believed in it. It seemed, in the big essentials, right against wrong. We were told—oh, you know all the things we were told, the dreams we lived on!”
“I know,” said Stacey.
“All to end in this,—this bitter merciless peace, with all the seeds of new wars in it!”
“Well,” asked Stacey, “when you saw the futile pettiness that revealed itself in men, and the pomposity, and the selfishness, and the greed”—he spat the word out—“did you expect anything better?”
“Not after a while, no,” Phil replied steadily. “At first I did. When I saw the heroism. What happened to the war? A great 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.”
Catherine drew a long breath. “And then?” she murmured.
“And then,” he returned, “you went on existing somehow, impersonally, without any emotions—”
“Are you sure?” Phil broke in.
“And without one tattered shred of an illusion left. I made up a story about it once—it must have been in 1916. Imagine a man who has always lived in a house with a roof of beautiful stained glass, and who revels in the soft colors that shine through. One day a tremendous hail storm comes and shatters the glass to fragments and lets the bleak white daylight pour in. Well, at first the man is heart-broken. But, after a little, he thinks: ‘Anyway this is truth. This 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.”
Philip and Catherine stared at Stacey.
The latter shook his head impatiently. “But that’s all past,” he said coolly. “That was 1916. I give you my word that I don’t think about myself at all any more. It’s an effort, trying to. I haven’t any thoughts, and I don’t care a rap for any one, and there isn’t anything I want to do, but I’m jolly well not going to do anything 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.”
He laughed. “All right,” he assented.