At nine the next morning Stacey drove down town with his father. Perhaps no real intimacy was possible between them, since they had hardly a thought or a belief in common, but they were, simply through a heightened mutual friendliness, closer together than they had been for six years. Stacey went up to his father’s pleasant office and watched Mr. Carroll sit down in his swivel-chair, light a cigar, and open his letters with a paper-knife. Stacey smiled. “I’ve sometimes wondered, sir,” he said, “why at sixty or thereabouts you—”
“Here! Here! Stop it!” Mr. Carroll interrupted ruefully.
“Well, anyway I’ve wondered why you didn’t retire and just amuse yourself, since you’ve certainly earned a rest. But—”
“Retire? Nonsense! Work,—that’s all a man’s good for. Got to stay in harness. Soon as he gets out of it he goes to pieces.”
“H’m,” said Stacey banteringly, “that’s the theory, of course. But just look around you. Here you come down to a bright jolly office entirely cut off from the home, and open nice crisp new letters, and call in—presently, when I stop bothering you—a fresh clean stenographer, and you watch the blue smoke of a good cigar curl up across the sunlight—no, sir, you can’t fool me with any talk about duty and the rest. Poetry! Sheer poetry! Men’s ingenuous little romance!”
Mr. Carroll leaned back in his chair and laughed.
“American business men,—why they’re our real leisure class!” Stacey concluded.
But at this his father protested. “I worked ten hours a day and sometimes twelve—hard—from the time I was eighteen till past forty,” he observed soberly.
“I know you did, sir,” Stacey assented respectfully. “I’m not talking about that epoch but about our own. The young business men I know—and I don’t mean the clerks, people working on a salary, but the men who will be rich one day from business—how about them? They get down to their offices anywhere from nine-thirty to ten, and they waste a good half-hour before they begin to work, and they play a lot even when they think they’re working; then they take an hour and a half off at the club for lunch; at four or thereabouts, weather permitting, they motor out to the country-club and play nine holes of golf; then they go back to a nice, different, clean house, with all the housekeeping tended to by their pretty wives. Oh, it’s a hard life!”
“You’re right,” the older man growled. “It’s a damned lazy life, and I don’t know what the country’s coming to if it keeps on.”
“Now really,” Stacey suggested, “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.
Mr. Carroll gazed at his son with interest. “Going back to work, eh?”
“Yes.”
“Look here!” said the older man sharply. “How would you like a job with me? Lots of big things you could work into.”
Stacey hesitated. He would have done a great deal to please his father. But after a moment he shook his head.
“No, sir,” he replied reluctantly. “I’d like it; honestly I would. It would be a fascinating new game. But architecture is the one thing I know about. You gave me years of study in it. I’d better stick to it.”
His father nodded. “Right!” he said. “I can see that.”
A few minutes later Stacey opened the door of Mr. Parkins’s private office. “Hello!” he remarked. “Can I come in?”
“Well, Stacey!” cried the architect cordially. “How are you?”
“First-rate. Got a job for me?”
Mr. Parkins stared at him with a humorous smile. “Now what have you gone and done—reformed?”
Stacey laughed. “Not so far as I know,” he said lightly.
“Then you must have acquired grace.”
Stacey waved the suggestion aside deprecatingly. “No,” he said, “but I’ll tell you the truth. I’ve worried my head too long about the problems of the universe. Everybody’s doing it. A mistake. Work’s all there is for a man—not as a drug, but just because it’s the only thing he knows about and can take hold of.” And Stacey had not equivocated. As far as it went this did seem truth to him—just a fragment of the truth. “How about that job?” he added.
“Sure! Glad to have you. We need you badly. Hadn’t found any one to replace poor Phil Blair. My offer’s still open.”
“No,” said Stacey, suddenly grave at the mention of Phil, “take me on for a couple of months at the old salary. Then if I’m any good you can repeat your offer if you want to. I may have forgotten everything I knew. Tell me,” he added, suddenly feeling all this as of very little importance, “how did Phil do? Tell me about Phil.”
“The most lovable chap I’ve ever known,” said Mr. Parkins soberly, “and he worked very hard—too hard. I could have cried when I heard he was dead. But he wasn’t the best man for the place. You would have been better. Odd, that power in any one so frail! I felt as though I were hiring Bramante to design bath-tubs.”
Stacey nodded.
The architect smiled suddenly. “I didn’t mean what I said to sound uncomplimentary to you,” he added.
“Oh,” said Stacey impatiently, “I never thought of that. I’ll be down ready to work at nine to-morrow morning. Good-bye.” And he left the office abruptly.
When he was again on the street he hesitated for a moment, then set off on foot for his sister’s house, two miles distant. But the mention of Phil’s name had thrown him into so deep a preoccupation that he walked mechanically, hardly aware of his surroundings, and did not even notice the greetings people waved at him from passing motor cars. He had neglected Phil for chimaeras, he mused sadly. When you thought about life as a whole it was horrible—and dead—a cold motionless monster that froze your veins. Real life, good or bad, wretched or happy, but warm, was in personal relationships—and nowhere else. He had let veil after gray veil of bleak abstractions descend between himself and Phil, obscuring this warmest and freshest of realities. And now Phil was dead. So Stacey meditated, but without bitterness; for there was a kind of fatalism upon him. Whatever was, was. Well, there was still Catherine. Perhaps he could make it up to her a little.
But when at last he mounted the steps of his sister’s house his melancholy fled; for he was genuinely eager to see Julie and was glad when the maid told him she was at home—out in the garden behind the house, he learned, and made haste to join her.
“Well, Stace!” she cried joyfully at sight of him, and threw her arms around him in a warm hug, taking care to keep her gloved hands, which were muddy with weeding, from touching his coat, and laughing because of doing so. “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.
“Jimmy and Junior both well?” he asked.
“Splendid! Jimmy’s getting rather fat, and I—well, you see! So we’re both dieting. We sit with a book propped up in front of us and count the calories in everything.” She laughed and sat down beside her brother.
“Too much happiness,” said Stacey. “Not enough conflict. You and Jimmy ought to fight more.”
He was wondering about his sister. Could it really be that she encountered no problems at all? There was a sweetness and a sureness about her that made him doubt such an obvious hypothesis.
“I’ll stay to lunch, Jule, if you’ll ask me,” he began, “because—”
“Of course I will! How nice!” she interrupted.
“—Because it will be my only chance for a while. I’m going back to work with Parkins to-morrow.”
“Oh, I’m glad!” she exclaimed.
“Are you? Why?”
She looked at him rather shyly, frowning a little. “Because,” she said after just an instant, “you have so fine a training it seems a shame to waste it and let houses be built more clumsily by people who haven’t had it.”
Stacey felt grateful for her reply. She might have said: “Because I think you’ll be happier,” or: “Because I think every man ought to do something.” She had their father’s direct way of going straight to the heart of a question, and she was so simple about it that she got no credit for intelligence. What she said always sounded usual.
She went on with her weeding now, and they talked cordially of superficial things.
Junior, back from kindergarten, made himself the centre of conversation during lunch, but afterward Julie sent him away with his nurse, and sat down with Stacey in the living-room.
It was curious, he thought, what a sense of intimacy he felt, since, except for that one remark of hers, they had talked only of externals.
“Julie,” he demanded abruptly, “does everything really run along for you as smoothly as it seems to? Are you truly perfectly happy?”
She gave him a startled look, her eyes suddenly troubled. “No,” she said painfully, after a long moment, “I’m not so—bovine as all that. Oh,” she added quickly, “I get along! I haven’t any soul tragedies and I’m not in love with some other man than Jimmy, but there are things”—she pressed her fingers together nervously—“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.
“You never tried to find out, did you, Stacey dear?” she replied gently.
“No,” he assented.
“But why should you?” she asked, defending him against her own attack. “Every one’s the same way. They all think: ‘Oh, Julie,—just the typical housewife!’?”
“The more fools they!” Stacey muttered.
“No, it’s natural. I behave that way. I have to behave some way.”
“It’s a lot to your credit. The world would be smoother if every one did. Don’t be cross with me for stirring you up, Jule. It wasn’t nasty—or meant to be. I was only interested.”
She gave him a warm smile. “Of course I’m not cr............