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.”
“No doubt,” Stacey assented politely.
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.”
“Yes,” he admitted angrily.
“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.”
“Why?” Stacey asked. “Is he so anxious to be rid of you?”
But at this Marian only laughed without replying.
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.
“Where have you come from, Stacey?” she asked.
“From your house,” he replied, with an acid smile.
“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?”
“Yes,” said Stacey coolly, “I believe so.”
After this they were silent for a while.
“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?”
“No,” Stacey muttered, “of course not! I don’t know why.”
“Can’t you—find out why?” she asked gently.
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.”
He shook his head.
“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.”
Stacey smiled. “You’re much more girlish than your daughter,” he said.
They were silent for a long while.
Then: “Did you have an awful, awful time, Stacey?” she asked softly.
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—”
“Violently, yes,” he interrupted coolly. “Not 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!”
“Poor me?” he asked. “Why? I’m all right, and free—or almost.”
“Free, or almost?” she repeated.
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.
“So as to be free?”
“Yes.”
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’!”
He stared at her sullenly.
“I know you’re determined not to, but you must!” she cried.
“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.”