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.
“What is it you fellows want?” he asked curiously.
There ensued a rumble of hostile voices and some sharp cries. “Beat it, you bum!” “Get to hell out of here, you damned aristocrat!”
“Oh, shut up! I want to know,” Stacey said impatiently. “You must have some idea about it.”
The rumble became a roar, a man struck out at Stacey, and Stacey promptly knocked him down. There was a general mix-up during which Stacey was surprised to find a man—one of the laborers, so far as he had time to see—fighting efficiently on his side.
The police, who must have been close-at-hand, presently smashed up the affray and rescued the two, whereupon Stacey, rather battered, but happier than he had been for a long while, swung about to investigate his comrade-in-arms.
“By the Lord! Burnham!” he cried, with real pleasure.
“The same, Captain,” said the other, instinctively raising his hand in salute, then dropping it again awkwardly.
But Stacey seized the hand and wrung it. Burnham had been first sergeant in one of his two companies.
Stacey gave his name to the police, observed that he was much obliged but that there was nothing to make a fuss about, and walked away with Burnham.
“Quite like old times, eh?” he remarked.
“Oh, this!” said Burnham, and spat scornfully.
“What are you doing up here?” Stacey demanded. “Thought you lived in Omaha.”
“Well, I did. And my wife and kids are still there with my wife’s sister. But I heard there was good work with better pay up here, so I come up to see, and I was drivin’ a truck, and then the boys went out—”
“Oh, look here!” cried Stacey. “Then you were one of them! I swear I’m sorry! This will put you in bad with the others, won’t it?”
Burnham grinned. “They won’t exactly be coming around and begging me to have another drink of ginger extract on them,” he admitted. “It don’t matter, Captain, honest it don’t! I was going back to Omaha anyway.”
Stacey stopped walking and stared at him curiously. “Why on earth did you side with me?” he asked.
“I dunno,” said the other, looking down and shuffling with his feet on the sidewalk. “Habit, I guess. No,” he added, looking Stacey in the eye, while a dull flush spread over his face, “no, it ain’t that. I’d go anywhere you went, Captain, even if it was straight to hell. Pshaw, hell would be a song compared with some of the places I’ve gone with you!”
Stacey was touched and also disturbed. What a responsibility! Here was a bond with a vengeance!
“I’m blessed if I know why,” he murmured, and they walked on. “And yet,” he exclaimed suddenly, “you’ve been here in Vernon for I don’t know how long and haven’t even come to see me! Is hell the only place you’ll accompany me to? Have you got a special preference for it?”
Burnham hung his head. “Well, you see,” he muttered, “you’re such a confounded swell up here, Captain!”
Stacey again paused abruptly and turned on the man. “Damn you, Burnham, I’m not!” he cried. “What do you say that for?”
“Well,” said Burnham apologetically, “maybe you don’t want to be, maybe you ain’t, but I guess you’ll have a hell of a time not to be. Looks to me like every one’s gone back the way they was before.”
Stacey felt profoundly discouraged, the comment was so obviously true.
“Was that what the men down there had against me?” he inquired almost humbly, walking on once more.
“Sure!” Burnham assented. “The boys are all right, but they’re touchy. And you blow in, not meaning any harm—but they didn’t know that, not knowing you like I know you—and you ask them what the matter is, like a man giving orders, and they get sore.”
Sullen anger with himself crept over Stacey. It was all true enough. 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!
“By the way,” he asked quietly, “what is it they want, Burnham?”
“They’re getting seventy cents an hour—my crowd, I mean. They want eighty.”
“I see.”
They continued, in silence, until at last they reached the Carroll house. Burnham paused to look up at it.
“Some place, Captain!” he observed appreciatively.
“You know it?”
“Yes, I—I’ve been by here before,” said Burnham sheepishly.
“Oh, you’ve been by here before, have you?” Stacey returned sharply. “Well, you’re not going by this time. You’re coming in.”
“No, now listen, Captain! I’m going to take the ten P.M. for Omaha.”
“Well, you can start for it from here as well as from anywhere else. Come now! March!”
Newspaper reporters were ringing Stacey insistently on the telephone.
“Pshaw!” he answered. “Nothing to it. Went down to strike headquarters to ask silly questions, and got into a baby fracas, as I deserved to. No casualties. No, I can’t tell you any more. There isn’t any more to tell.”
He took Burnham up to his study and made him sit down. “Now I tell you what we’ll do,” he said. “About nine-fifteen or so we’ll drive around to your boarding-house or wherever it is you’ve been living and pick up your things—”
Burnham was grinning. “Gee, Captain, you’re innocent, considering what kind of things you’ve been through!” he interrupted. “D’you think after what’s happened that I’d find any of my stuff there? I’d find a bunch of the boys waiting to beat me up.”
“Oh!” said Stacey. And, paying no heed to Burnham’s embarrassed protestations, he pulled a travelling-bag from a closet and packed it. “Oh, shut up!” he said finally. “Go into the bath-room there and wash. You’re even dirtier than I am.”
Presently the door of the study was thrown open and Mr. Carroll hurried in, red-faced and out of breath. “I’ve just heard,” he panted. “Did those damned scoundrels do you any—”
“Sh!” said Stacey, raising his finger to his lip, as Burnham came out of the bath-room. “Father, this is Burnham, my first sergeant—C Company—and as good a man as I’ve run up against. Incidentally, though he’s one of the boys who’re striking, he turned in and fought them with me this afternoon. Whole thing very silly. Neither of us hurt at all. Burnham will stay to dinner.”
Mr. Carroll looked at Burnham keenly and held out his hand. “I’m glad to know you, Sergeant,” he said.
“American Legion Veteran Attacked By Strikers!” announced the newspaper headlines next morning.
“The striking dock and dray men added another outrage to their intolerable behavior when they yesterday violently attacked former Captain Stacey Carroll, D.S.C., a hero 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.
“Accidenti alla stampa!” (damn newspapers!) they agreed heartily.
But Stacey’s pleasant frame of mind on leaving the hospital was destroyed by his glimpse of the morning paper’s noon edition. His letter was there, but ruined by the caption above: “Captain Carroll’s Generous Reply—Makes Light of Cowardly Attack—Would Exonerate Strikers,” and by the fulsome eulogy of his behavior that followed. A vibrant editorial completed the wreck, insisting that while the personal magnanimity shown in Captain Carroll’s letter must appeal to every red-blooded citizen, the time had at last come when law and order must be . . . etc.
Without the slightest desire to align himself either on one side or the other, save that he felt a little more personal sympathy with the strikers, who anyway lived in touch with the few realities of life, than with their opponents, Stacey saw himself established irremediably as a Saint-George-like champion of law and order. He damned the press more earnestly than before. He lunched at the club with his father, whose eyes shone with approval of him, and he had, moreover, to undergo an ordeal of praise and congratulation from his father’s friends, together with briefer, less intense words from men of his own age. (The younger men, he told himself, were anyhow less grandiloquent nowadays than the older, though perhaps this was only because 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.
There was no constraint in Carter’s and Jack’s greetings.
“Uncle Stacey,” cried Carter immediately, “I got A in arithmetic on my report in New York and A in reading and B-Plus in spelling!”
“Well, that’s good,” said Stacey. “What did you get in conduct?”
Catherine smiled.
“C-Plus,” said Carter in a small voice. But his depression did not last long. “Uncle Stacey,” he exclaimed, “do ‘Fly away, Jack! Fly away, Jill!’ for him.” He pointed to his brother. “I bet he can’t guess the secret! I bet he’ll look all over the room for them!” And Carter grinned a delighted toothless grin.
“H’m!” observed Stacey, obediently making the necessary preparations, “I remember some one else who looked all over the room for them a few years ago.”
“I guess you mean me,” Carter replied. “Well, I guess I did. I guess I was awful stupid maybe.”
“Carter,” said his mother, with a laugh, “there aren’t that many ‘guesses’ in the whole dictionary.”
Presently Phil arrived. He looked tired with the heat, but his thin face brightened when he saw Stacey there playing with the boys.
“Stacey, you’re a fraud!” he said. “What sort of behavior is this for a misanthrope? You ought to be gloating over what Jack and Carter will grow up to be.”
Catherine put an end to the game and sent the boys out to play on the porch. “Yes,” she said, as she closed the door upon them, “I guess Stacey doesn’t mean all he says. I guess he’s really kind-hearted. I guess he likes children, maybe.”
Phil stared at his wife and smiled. “For heaven’s sake, Catherine,” he demanded, “what’s come over your English?”
Stacey laughed. “Corrupting effect of Carter,” he explained. “Yes, of course I like children.”
“Would you like to have some of your own?” Phil asked.
Stacey reflected, frowning. “Yes,” he replied at last, “I think so. Just one, a boy, so that I could try bringing him up.”
Phil and Catherine both laughed.
“Upon my word,” said the former, “this is delightful! Fancy finding you not merely humanly usual but positively universal—a bachelor with theories on education! What is your present theory, my son?”
Stacey smiled. However, it had become difficult for him to smile, and when he did so his face took on uneasy lines. He was not at his best when smiling. He was at his best when his face remained impassive and soldierly.
“Oh,” he said drily, “it’s a romantic enough theory, quite Rousseau-like. I’ve just invented it this minute. If I had a son I should take him to live in the country, in some place where the landscape was neither too grand, and thus apt to arouse vast disturbing aspirations in him, nor yet ignominious and depressing, like these dingy middle-western plains. I would have him live among trees, that are handsome and do no harm, and associate familiarly with a great many kindly simple-minded animals such as dogs, cows and horses, with a few cultivated elegant animals such as cats, and—less frequently and intimately—with one or two goats, who are old, sophisticated and skeptical, the libres penseurs among animals.”
“And with no humans at all, eh?”
“Well,” said Stacey dubiously, “perhaps now and then an occasional, very choice human, such as you or Catherine, just to show him what human 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.”