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.”
“All right,” said Stacey, “so will I, if you’ll take me.”
“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.”
“All right.” The car leaped forward.
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?”
“Sounds good.”
“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.”
“Who is it?” he asked Parker, when they were in the hall.
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.”
“You did perfectly right. Where is she?”
“In the little drawing-room, sir.”
“Most likely a book agent,” said Stacey, and walked down the hall.
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.
“Well, then, I’ll be going,” she remarked, in a strangled voice.
He went to the door with her. “Good night, Irene,” he said cordially, shaking her hand.
“I—I’m sorry to have—put you out,” she said absurdly.
“Oh, that’s all right!” he replied, with a touch of amusement. “Good night.”
Stacey returned to Whittaker. “Sorry to keep you so long,” he observed.
“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.
“Yes, good stuff, isn’t it?” said Stacey, and took a stiff drink.
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.
“Gee!” she exclaimed, “there’s two of you!”
“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.”
“Huh?”
“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.
With such trivial talk they passed the time.
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, ............